Why You Need to Prioritize IT Resilience

I want you to take a moment and consider something: is your business prepared to survive any kind of data disaster? If you aren’t, you need to ensure that your systems—all your systems—can recover from whatever feasible event might impact them. This is what is known as IT resilience. Let’s dive in a little deeper.

Understanding Resilience

Resilience is a kind of catch-all phrase that combines three more specific business technology concerns into one overarching process. These concerns are as follows:

1. High Availability of the software and hardware that businesses rely on, including redundancy in its design and how well it can bounce back from non-critical failures, user error, and deliberate attack.
2. Cybersecurity, so that systems are properly defended, and any vulnerabilities or security incidents are swiftly identified and attended to.
3. Disaster Recovery so that downtime can be minimized, and some semblance of normal processing can be maintained if some catastrophic event is to strike.

All three of these concerns need to be addressed to achieve true resilience—where your technology infrastructure can withstand issues, recover, and resume their operations efficiently. True resilience means that your customers could potentially not notice an issue, as you could pivot and address the problem at hand.

How to Ensure Resilience

Let’s look at resilience in different terms to help illustrate how an IT infrastructure should be approached.

Consider a bridge. For a bridge to be considered resilient, it first needs to be designed and constructed well enough to hold up under pressure. Are the supports sufficient to handle the traffic the bridge is subjected to, with built-in safety precautions? How easily can damages and safety concerns be repaired to keep the bridge in use? This runs parallel to the prerequisite high availability of your hardware and software.

This bridge also needs to be resistant to intentional sabotage. If someone could simply sneak up and remove a few bolts, the word “resilience” is hardly fitting. Keeping the bridge secure is like the idea of applying cybersecurity protections to your business’ computing systems.

Finally, what if the worst were to happen and the bridge was to somehow fail? Are there strategies in place to rescue those who were on the bridge as it collapsed? How would traffic be diverted to ensure that other drivers are able to continue their trips without adding to the disaster? How could the bridge be sufficiently repaired or replaced to safely resume activity? This kind of preparation is the definition of disaster recovery, something that you need to have prepared for your business’ benefit.

Planning for Your Own Resilience

These kinds of considerations need to be present in every step of your processes. For instance, let’s say you were in the process of preparing your business’ disaster recovery strategy, and you had to plan out your backup data stores. Keeping all your backed-up data in the same place as the original copy isn’t a very resilient option, as a single disaster could wipe out every copy you have.

Furthermore, you must make sure that—while some hierarchy of importance should be established—you are prepared to protect every aspect of your business’ IT.

This includes all your data, the storage that holds it, the infrastructure that allows you to access it, the location that you conduct your business from, and yes, also the people who you have employed to assist you. While all these deliberations and preparations may not be cheap, they will cost you far less than the impacts associated with not preparing for disaster.

Where to Turn for Help

Admittedly, this is a considerable process, and it is one that can only be handled effectively by an experienced IT professional. This is where many businesses encounter obstacles.

With many small and medium-sized businesses today relying on one or two employees to handle all their IT support needs or calling in another business only after encountering an issue, true resiliency can seem like an unattainable ideal for many.

It also doesn’t help that IT resilience isn’t a one-size-fits-all process, that each individual business’ situation will call for a unique solution set. This is often too great a challenge for an overworked internal team, or a cookie-cutter quick fix provider.

However, for a managed service provider like Horne & Benik, this challenge fits our service model to a ‘T’.

What We Can Do

Rather than installing the same solutions for all our clients, our team handles things a little differently. First, we comprehensively audit and examine your business and its situation—your biggest vulnerabilities, your greatest strengths, and all circumstances surrounding your operations—to design a network infrastructure and data strategy that optimizes your technology to suit your needs.

Horne & Benik can also supplement your existing IT resources, or serve as your outsourced department, to ensure that your technology is highly available and secure, with a customized plan in place to deal with worst-case situations.

To learn more about how our services can make your business technology more resilient, and you more successful as a result, reach out to us by calling (603) 499-4400.