How to develop a successful technological plan for your business

What would happen if you would have suddenly could not access your email, your client database or your accounting system? What effect would it have on your business?

Whatever the industry in which you are, you depend on one thing to succeed – timely and accurate information.

Whether names, phone numbers, and product preferences of your customers, supplier prices or details on government programs, followed by this information is essential, so you can use it to take Critical business decisions.

This is not something you can afford to leave at random. The preparation of an effective technological plan is necessary to ensure that you will have access to the information you need, when you need it.

How do you develop such a plan?

The first step is to realize that it is not a one-off project. It is a continuous effort that requires continued attention. Once you have the general framework of the plan in place, you will need to implement it fully effective. Some elements (such as backup and disaster recovery tests) must occur regularly, so you can check your processes work and your data will be present in an emergency.

Then you should evaluate the needs of your business for safety and redundancy.

Safety refers to which has access to what data, software and hardware. If you are a one-person shop, you may have access to everything – but you need to know what it means with regard to what you could break inadvertently. If your business has employees, you should consider the data that each person can display or delete – maliciously or accidentally.

Redundancy refers to your backup plan for critical systems. Does your business currently build on a single point of failure? What would it be necessary to circumvent this system if it has stopped working? Does the cost of downtime justify investment in a secondary system?

Finally, you should think about monitoring, safeguarding and recovering disasters remotely. No matter how much you prepare, something will be finished. You can not change that – you have to work around that.

A remote server monitoring solution can help you sleep at night. This type of early warning system can let you know immediately when a problem occurs, so you can send it and may avoid data loss.

As mentioned above, you must test your backups regularly, to check that you really save what you think you’re backing up – and you can restore it successfully.

Planning the recovery after the disaster helps you prepare for the worst case. As your backups, such a plan must be tested periodically – including the restoration of all enterprise critical software and data on emergency equipment – to ensure that your organization can continue to operate in case of fire, Flood, flight, flight or other disruptive event.