How To Protect Your Business From Blackouts, Ten Top Tips

23/12/09

By Dominic List, CEO of Comtact

Many small and medium businesses (SMEs)are poorly prepared in the event of IT and telecoms problems. Here are simple tips that all SMEs should adhere to to ensure that they are fully prepared in the event of a blackout.

1. Ensure you have a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) on all your main servers and telephone system, this will ensure that in power outages you won't lose vital data

2. Take a resilient phone line solution to ensure you don't lose your business telephones in case of an exchange or network failure

3. Ensure you back up your data off site....

...If you're still using tape, when was the last time you checked it and where do you keep them?

4. Develop a strategy for working at home in case of fire, flood or other incident in your office.

5. A back up internet circuit from another provider should be used to keep your office connected in the event of a line or ISP failure

6. Ensure your website is secure and backed up in case of ISP issues

7. Do some research on offices locally where you could recover your business to in the event of a local disaster in your office area

8. Look at hosting your data in a secure data centre, this could be done whilst virtualising your servers which could save you money

9. Non-geographic numbers are not tied to a local exchange and can be re-routed quickly in the event of a telephone line or system issue

10. Ensure that you have maintenance contracts on any critical items like telephone systems, main servers and network switches

11. If you have redundant equipment configured as standby, make sure it's plugged in and configured correctly before you need it

12. Have a plan in place. Think of all the possible scenarios and how you would deal with them, then try them out

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