One of the most important aspects of IT Consulting is planning. Once the consultation process is over it’s our job as your Managed Service Provider (MSP) to find the most cost effective way to keep your business processes going in the event of a disaster. In many cases, you’d assume a disaster is something like a flood or natural disaster that brings a power outage. But there are all kinds of disasters.
Employees make unintentional accidents everyday and it’s important to stay aware and plan for that. As your MSP, it’s our job to stay on top of that and get you set up with business recovery planning and business continuity management. That way your day-to-day business operations won’t break down when accidents happen.
What is Business Continuity?
Business interruptions and downtime can be expensive. Each minute of downtime has monetary value attached to it so, planning helps you avoid taking a big financial hit. Business Continuity Planning uses risk assessment and risk management to determine what are the greatest potential threats to your most important day-to-day operations.
After determining your most critical business functions, a plan is put into place to make sure those systems stay up and running in the event that a disaster occurs. Ever since COVID hit, there has been a significant rise in remote work. Although some people are appreciating the benefits of a greater work-life balance, the state of cybersecurity has become troubling across the entire world.
The healthcare industry specifically has been hit hard. According to the World Health organization (WHO) "Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO has seen a dramatic increase in the number of cyber attacks directed at its staff, and email scams targeting the public at large.”
WHO experienced a serious attack in which “450 active WHO email addresses and passwords were leaked online along with thousands belonging to others working on the novel coronavirus response.” According to WHO this issue didn’t put their systems at risk because the data was not recent. However, the attack did impact an older extranet system, used by current and retired staff as well as partners.
After the attack, WHO made the decision to migrate the affected systems to a more secure authentication system.
Situations like these display how important it is to work with the right MSP to determine what kind of backups and disaster recovery planning you need.
Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning
Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning, or BDR, involves recovery strategies that ensure your data storage devices are functional at all times. It also ensures that you have the right backups for your specific kind of business and that there are copies of those backups. The more copies the better. Today, in many cases a business might have their data backed up to the cloud, along with it physically existing at a data center.
Having multiple backups is known as redundancy and ensures there will always be a copy of the important information you need, even if a cybercriminal tries to hold it for ransom. Data is vital to your organization. It allows you to operate. That’s why BDR and business continuity planning is such a necessity.
Consider all the work you’ve put into your business up until today. Imagine that work being put at risk because one of your employees accidentally clicked on a malicious link in a phishing email. It wasn’t intentional, but that action could be catastrophic for your business, especially if you’re a smaller SMB.
Consulting services through a Managed Service Provider not only ensures protection and less downtime, you get service for one flat monthly fee, and you work with a team of people who actually care about your business. Unlike hiring an outside contractor for a one-time fix, an MSP is there as if they were a part of your own business. You can call them anytime and typically offer 24 hour support.
If you’d like more information about IT Consulting through an MSP and Business Continuity Planning, contact The TNS Group today.
Categories: Managed Service Provider, MSP Blogs
