When the Power Goes Out Will Your Business be Ready?
Whether it’s a single power switch that malfunctions or a full-on blackout, the loss of power in your IT infrastructure can be devastating. Just ask Delta Airlines. Last year, the failure of a single switch halted their U.S. operations. It took them days to recover and cost millions of dollars.
For small-to-mid-size businesses, outages can have such an impact that they never recover and in some cases go out of business. Outages can suspend operations, impact customer service and corrupt or wipe out data throughout your network, impacting anything from a few files to all of your data. Yikes!
Outages are going to happen – whether they impact you depends on these three risk factors:
Have you managed end-of-life? We all have issues as we age. Your computer equipment and your software are no different. When hardware is near or has passed its useful lifespan, an outage is much more likely. Likewise, aged software that is no longer supported by the developer (think Windows XP) can have several issues. Most importantly, unsupported software is more prone to security vulnerabilities which can cause outages, data corruption and more.
The fix: Keep your hardware up to date and ensure you use the latest operating systems and business applications to provide your company with a stable network environment.
Are you secure? Many companies think their antivirus is enough security to offer protection, or they’re using an older firewall that’s not designed to handle today’s threats. Many small-to-midsize-businesses aren’t aware of the most current best practices, when it comes to network security. With more attacks happening on small businesses, it’s important to keep up to date on the latest security needs for your company.
The fix: Ensure that you have a business-class firewall that can protect your on-premises infrastructure. Unified Threat Management capabilities is the best option as it greatly increases overall security on your network.
Will your battery backups last? Uninterruptable power supply (UPS) devices are essential to maintaining power during an outage. This gives your servers and storage devices enough time to shut down and preserve your company data. These devices degrade over time; often without warning signs. During a critical event, degraded battery backups won’t give you enough time, resulting in corrupted or lost data.
The fix: We conduct periodic run-time tests for clients. Those tests simulate power failure in a secure environment, and ultimately tests the duration of your UPS battery power. This ensures that at a critical point, you have enough “juice” to shut down your business critical hardware properly.
At some point, power will go out. Whether that outage is a non-event or catastrophe to your business all depends on how well you’ve managed these outage risks. If you’re not confident that your company is prepared for an outage, we can help.
Need help getting your business prepared for a potential outage? Contact Applied Tech (608)729-1300
