How to Ensure Your IT Resilience

How confident are you that your business could survive a data disaster of any size and scale, from a single misplaced file to a complete loss of your entire onsite infrastructure? Being prepared to recover from any version of events is key to your business’ success. Let’s discuss this concept, which is widely known as IT resilience.

What is IT Resilience?

Resilience is a kind of umbrella term, covering three more specific business IT concerns and consolidating them into a single concept. These three concerns are:

1. High availability of your business’ crucial hardware and software, covering how well it can rebound from issues like minor failures, user errors, and attacks. This means that your resources need some level of redundancy.
2. Cybersecurity measures, so your IT resources are protected against threats and any security issues that do arise can be rapidly identified and mitigated.
3. Disaster recovery solutions that can minimize your downtime should some event impact your business processes, so that you can quickly return to productive operations.

These three concerns each must be attended to for your company and its IT to be truly resilient… where these issues can be experienced and overcome, and your business can fully recover and resume operations as usual. Ideally, your resilience will be high enough that your customers could conceivably go without even noticing that an issue took place before you had already resolved it.

Ensuring Resilience

To best understand the process of making sure that your IT infrastructure is sufficiently resilient, let’s look at a different example.

How often do you cross a bridge? For that bridge, resilience is extremely important, as it will need to hold up against a lot of pressure to successfully do its job. This means that a lot of consideration and care need to go into its design and construction. Supports need to be able to handle the amount of traffic with precautions put in place, safety concerns need to be addressed for the bridge to continue functioning, and so many other concerns need to be seen to. The same can be said of your business’ hardware and software.

How well can the bridge resist intentional sabotage as well? If it’s easy for someone to make it more vulnerable to issues, “resilient” is hardly the right word. Tying this back to your infrastructure, how much cybersecurity is in place to protect it?

Finally, what’s the plan for the worst-case scenario, like if the bridge were to fail? What strategies have you prepared to deal with the immediate effects and the ramifications moving forward? Are you prepared to divert traffic to maintain operations? How well, and how quickly, can the bridge be repaired for traffic to continue? This kind of disaster recovery preparation is something that you need to have completed for your business.

Planning for Resilience

Each step of your processes and procedures needs to be examined to ensure that your strategies are sufficiently prepared for the potential events that could impact them. For instance, in terms of your disaster recovery strategy, where are your data backups stored? Keeping them in the same place as your original data is not resilient at all, as it could just take one disaster to lose it all.

Plus, even though there needs to be some ranking in terms of importance, you need to make sure that all your business’ IT is protected. All your data and its storage infrastructure, your business location, and yes, your employees, all need to be considered as you reinforce against disaster. Will it be cheap? No—but experiencing a disaster will be far worse.

Who Can Help?

True business resilience requires a very in-depth process, and as such, it requires the skill of an experienced IT professional. This is a hurdle for many businesses, with many currently relying on the skill of one or two of their employees to handle their IT needs and provide the support necessary—or seeking out external assistance from an outside provider.

The fact that resilience also isn’t one-size-fits-all, but more individualized to each business’ solution, is another complication. Neither an internal team nor a call-in, one-off provider can usually manage this challenge. However, for a managed service provider like Washington Works, this all is firmly in our wheelhouse.

What We Can Provide

Instead of offering all our clients the same solutions and assuming they’ll work, our team approaches things from a more personalized angle. After a comprehensive audit and review of your situation, we’ll work with you to design and implement an infrastructure and strategy that mitigates your weakness and leverages your strengths.

We can supplement your existing IT or step in as an outsourced department, whatever you need to keep your technology secure and available to your business regardless of the situation. To learn more about our services at Washington Works, and how they can boost your IT’s resilience, reach out to our team by calling 301-571-5040.