How to Achieve a Peaceful, Relaxing Relationship with your Business – Part One

This article is part one of a three part series where we outline steps to take to help you achieve cohesion with your business technology. By following the steps outlined, you should see a dramatic increase in the stability and flexibility of your computers and equipment, freeing you up to focus on more important matters.

With regards to business, there is often a wide held belief that it cannot be easy. And, there’s some truth to this. With all the rules, government regulations, employee guidelines, HR regulations, industry specific information, and more that business owners must stay on top of, it is sometimes hard to remember if you’re coming or going.

Now add in additional business components, like making informed decisions about your office technology needs (and what all of that crazy industry lingo means), and it can end up being downright overwhelming.

But fret not. There’s an easy way to achieve peace and relaxation with your business, and it all starts with your technology. Having a strong, stable infrastructure in place does many great things for your business. It helps reduce staff frustration and downtime, while increasing productivity. It can also provide mobility, giving your business the flexibility to go anywhere.

Below is a list of the top 5 components we recommend for a stable business framework. Use this list while reviewing your current setup to see where your business is strong, and to assess what areas of your network need some extra attention.

5 Components of a Stable Business Infrastructure

1. Stable Systems

One of the quickest ways to have a stressful relationship with your business is to have technology that is unreliable or non-functioning. Resolve to reduce business frustrations by stabilizing your systems.

In order for a system to be stable, it should be up and running properly at least 98% of the time, or more. Additionally, when an outage occurs, it shouldn’t take down the entire office*, even if the outage involves your server.

Think about your current setup. How often is your system problematic or completely down? When an outage occurs, how does it impact the office? If your server went down, could your office be back up and running the same day, even when new equipment is required to fix the problem?

With technology as robust as it is today, there is little reason for your office to be down for a long period of time*, even if the outage involves your main server.

*In this context, we are talking about computer / hardware outages, not unforeseen issues such as natural disasters or acts of God.*

2. Backups and Redundancies

In order for your system to be stable and reliable, it is important to have backups and redundancies in place. Simply having one or the other in place, but not both, is not enough.

Backups are a necessary part of network stability, and are needed to ensure your data is safe should a disaster occur. However, it is important to keep in mind that not all backups are the same. In order for your business to be properly protected, your backups should occur at regular intervals (think hourly), and should be backed up off site.

Think about your current backup situation. Do backups happen on-site, or off? Where are your backups saved? Are they image backups or file backups? If your files are currently being backed up to an external hard drive that is in your IT room, you may want to consider putting a better backup system in place.

Aside from backups, it’s good to have some redundancies in place especially when it comes to your server, so that if hardware fails, you can easily switch over to the working hardware, and keep running. This often means having multiple hard drives. We also recommend a device like our Backup and Disaster Recovery (BRD) device, which not only backs up your data, but can serve as a spare server, should yours completely go down.