CONSULTING

At a Glance

Creating a business continuity plan

Downtime is expensive. Data loss can be a business threatening event. You don’t have to experience a major natural disaster to have a problem. A bad hard drive, a lightning strike or employee error can have lasting consequences if your business is not prepared. Let us help you create a business continuity plan by evaluating your options, like thinking about:

  • Switching operations to a different location
  • How to continue vital business operations
  • Identifying the most critical IT infrastructure components
  • Ensuring you have tested backups and functioning redundant equipment
  • Documenting your business continuity and disaster recovery processes
  • How frequently you need to test the scenarios to ensure business continuity is possible

Eclipse Consulting can help you prevent technology problems, and can help you get back up and running in the event disaster strikes.

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Creating a disaster recovery plan

The other vital plan is a disaster recovery plan. You may not be in an area that has frequent natural disasters, but you are still vulnerable to hardware failures, employee mistakes, malware, theft, fire, and other data loss vulnerabilities.

If in some unforeseen disaster, you lose your data – or access to your data – you’ll want to think about:

  • How quickly do you need to be back up and running?
  • How much data can you afford to lose?

Read the rest of our backup and recovery best practice recommendations.

Building your emergency binder

Whether you have a disaster or not, you need what we refer to as “a red binder.” This binder is not always red, and it’s not always a physical binder. But it is essential to data security. In this binder, you need to have up-to-date information about:

  • All software programs and passwords
  • Configuration settings
  • Support phone numbers

Your emergency may be that the IT guy quits. Then what? How do you get someone to fill their shoes? The red binder ensures that you, as the business owner, can access your computer systems, even if you never want to or need to.

Don’t forget about the disaster recovery plans of your vendors

It doesn’t have to be your disaster to need a disaster recovery plan. Do you know how much backup infrastructure your cloud-based software programs have? A smaller cloud-based CRM company went out of business as the result of Katrina. Everyone on that system lost their customer data. Horror stories abound about programmers losing custom source code. Fortunately, thanks to inexpensive online data storage, this happens less frequently.

Data recovery is about reducing risk

Yes, there is a real cost to having data recovery plans and business continuity plans. Just like there is a real cost to insurance.  But few things are more important than keeping your business up and running. If your business stays afloat, you can rebuild. If your business fails (as 66% do after a major data loss), you have to over, often with debt.

Just like insurance, you need a business continuity plan in place BEFORE you have a data loss. We are mindful that businesses have very real budgetary limits. Our team makes sure you understand your options and risks so you can make the decision that’s right for your business.

Request a free discovery session to see how we can help you sleep better at night, knowing your information is safely stored and can be easily recovered in any emergency.