Three Services You Need To Have In Place For Winter

With winter here, now is the time to evaluate whether or not your business has the tools in place to remain up and running in case disaster strikes. Here are three steps you can take.

Winter is in full swing, and even we Texans feel the chill in the air. Ever since last year's winter storm (summer too!) and resulting damage, many businesses are trying to figure out the best way to protect their business from a repeat of the interruption it suffered last year. To help your organization prepare, here are three steps you should enact to protect your technology and your business from disaster.

1. Have a Disaster Plan in Place

First and foremost, your organization needs to have a plan detailing what happens if a disaster, natural or man-made, occurs. This plan, known as a business continuity plan, is a blueprint to tell your team who, what, when, and where specific protocols are activated when disaster strikes and places your organization at risk. Some of these protocols should be:

• What is the chain of command if some or all of your c-level executives are out of contact due to extreme weather?
• Which services should your team focus on getting back online first? Telecommunications, office computers, or something else? 
• Do you have your data and important documents backed up to a safe location, and can they be recovered promptly?

2. Ensure Your Business Is Disaster Resistant

While your organization can't control extreme weather, it can control how it prepares for it. Areas your business should focus on are protecting your technology from environmental risks such as water and electrical threats, which can bring your office to a standstill, particularly when you're not in the office. 

Investing in environmental monitoring can alert your team when your office faces unexpected events: a broken water pipe, excessive heat, or unstable power delivery, which can damage, sometimes irreparably, the technology your business depends upon.

Extreme weather often brings unreliable power in the form of brownouts or even blackouts. One way to protect your organization from sudden power loss is to invest in UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) devices for all critical infrastructure. Your servers and network appliances should be on UPS systems, and even some of your most important workstations could benefit.

Note: A typical powerstrip or surge protector doesn’t hold a candle to a UPS device. Powerstrips likely won’t protect your infrastructure from lightning, and most cheap surge protectors are only rated for a certain amount of electricity. A UPS not only helps shield from surges and brownouts, they provide a few minutes of battery backup to allow users to save their work and shut down safely.

If you're using a power strip you purchased at your local big-box store, chances are they either aren't surge protectors or the insulation they offer, measured in joules, isn't sufficient to protect your equipment. A rule of thumb is that a workstation needs at least 4,000 joules of surge protection.

3. Develop Your Remote Workforce

Finally, we learned how few businesses were prepared to support a remote workforce from the pandemic. When a team began to work from home, most of them didn't have the resources to work efficiently. Issues such as a lack of sufficient broadband or working with underpowered PCs and laptops hindered their ability to be productive, but moreover, it was a lack of capability on the business side. Businesses just didn’t have the ability to allow staff ]access to the files and applications they needed remotely.

Additional concerns regarding newly remote workers were a lack of appropriate cybersecurity training for team members and not having essential cybersecurity protections, exposing their businesses' data to cyberattacks. 

If you haven't invested the resources to train and support your team should they need to work remotely, you are setting your organization up for failure. If the current business environment has shown us anything, businesses need to be agile enough to adapt to unexpected changes in the business landscape.

Austin Businesses, Don't Leave Your Operations at The Mercy of Weather

While bad weather is inevitable, its effects on your business don't have to be. Don't leave your organization's long-term survival to chance and whims of nature. When you partner with Capstone Works and take advantage of the benefits of managed IT, your organization will never be caught off-guard when disaster strikes. 

If you got through previous extreme weather events intact, the reality is unless you did so with planning, then you only had good luck, and luck always runs out. Instead of relying on the fickleness of luck, rely on the expertise of Austin's premier business technology providers. Call (512) 343-8891 today to schedule an appointment and learn how managed IT can help your business not only survive, but thrive in a disaster.