Planning for Business Continuity

People are usually great in a crisis, heroes appear, resolve the problems, get things back on track. But, why does a business have a need for heroes in the first place? A business should be forward looking enough to spot the potential crisis or outage. However, business continuity is far from sexy, particularly when everything working just tickety-boo.

So, business continuity planning is not just about having a plan for when things go wrong, it's central plank is to ensure that where there is business risk, appropriate mitigation is put in place. For instance, a business completely reliant on their CMS should have redundancy built in and no single points of failure whilst a business that uses a CMS in a small area of their business should not need such belt and braces. Horses for courses.

So, think of business continuity as two separate things:

• The pro-active removal or reduction of risk within the business and,
• Plans for dealing with a risk if it turns in to an issue.

Within the businesses technology infrastructure, there are three high level areas that need to be addressed:

• Single points of failure: If a single point of failure will significantly reduce the ability of the business to operate then it should be addressed, pragmatically. There's no point in implementing something that costs an arm and a leg that will only be used less than once a year.
• Siting of systems: Consider carefully siting of systems, for instance, siting an Email server in the office rather than the data-centre is convenient for staff, maybe, but if office internet links go down the company is far more cut off from the outside world than they would be if the Email server was sited in a data centre.
• Data back-up: This is simple: Make back-ups, regularly, keep an up to date set off site in a safe and secure place and test them regularly. It doesn't have to be sophisticated and indeed some of the cloud offerings are so cheap or free that it's a no-brainer nowadays.

It's not exciting, it's not fun, it's not even that interesting. But without business continuity planning, businesses can be sunk in hours. Technology should really take the lead on this now because so many business systems are reliant on their technology. If you need help getting your business continuity plans in place, GreenBOLD can help.

Technology to Drive Us Out of the Slump

Kevin Peesker from Dell has written a great article on the Business Zone which outlines how technology is the special fertilizer that will enable a company to grow. I agree with all of it, it's really good stuff and it's good to see it finally acknowledged that technology will be key to companies driving out of the slump.

What's not detailed though is exactly how the technology outlined is going to get in to a company and deliver the detailed benefits. There's a brief piece at the bottom of the article about how you can go about getting going, but it really doesn't even touch the sides of the requirement.

A CEO taking this on and trying to deliver it all is going to fail nine times out of ten. It's not worth the risk. To really take and deliver on the benefits outlined in this article, a CEO needs to find an expert. This is where GreenBOLD comes in, we provide corporate experienced IT Directors who can really make a difference and get the technologies outlined in the article implemented and delivering the benefits.

For more information on what we can do, please visit our website.

Reasons for Changing your IT

There are many companies out there that just muddle along with their IT. I'm always amazed how often when I talk about IT being a "necessary evil" how many company directors nod and smile ruefully. It really doesn't have to be this way, IT should never be seen as a necessary evil, particularly in today's world where IT is all pervasive. IT should be a positive benefit to a business, an enabler and even driver of revenue.

Today, Tech Republic have published a Top 10 list of warning signs that you need to change your IT landscape. I suggest you read it and if you can check off two or more of the items, it's time to really look seriously at your technology and work with someone to get it resolved.

I think the most telling is 5) Your falling way behind your competitors and 9) You can't support telecommuters.

It really is that simple. Technology in today's business will help drive revenues if you do it right. However, it isn't enough just to implement a change, you've got to do the right change and make sure the change delivers.

One company I know invested £100k in changing their IT landscape, but unfortunately didn't use someone experienced in these kind of implementations and in the subsequent 18months after the project finished they lost at least £250k of revenue simply because the IT systems they'd put in to boost performance had not delivered. Now they're having to spend more to get things put right. It's sad to see so much money wasted.

So, the first thing on your list to "doing it right" needs to be finding an appropriate expert. The right experts do not exist inside support and service companies, they will have their own interests at heart. Instead, an independent expert with a history of helping companies turn things around in the technology department is what you need.

Suffice to say that my company provides such a service. We are independent, we have plenty of successful IT Change programs behind us and we stick around afterwards to make sure it all actually delivers on the promise.

If you read the Tech Republic Top 10 and recognise your company's IT status in that list, get in touch for a no obligation discussion.