How Well-Prepared Are You To Tackle Power Outages?
It’s a fine day at the office, and everything is going as planned in your organization. Your systems are working without a hitch, and you just take a relaxed breath, thinking nothing could go wrong. And then it happens! A sudden power outage has you scrambling for your temporary power backup to manage your IT infrastructure.
Unfortunately, the outage lasts for hours, and thanks to the lack of adequate support, your IT system starts shutting down. This scenario is any IT team’s worst nightmare. Without a reliable disaster management plan, many IT teams have faced this situation where prolonged network outages have brought work to a grinding halt. The result is panicked management, thumb-twiddling users, and an embarrassing discovery of a preventable cause.
If you are running an organization with IT support, you must have an IT support plan. If not, you are putting your entire business at risk.
Let’s look at how you can plan and execute a foolproof Managed IT support process to deal with an outage that may help you breathe easy!
What’s a Disaster Management Plan for IT Support?
Despite the best technology, IT services and applications are not impervious to unexpected disasters. Of all that can disrupt your workload, a power outage is one that many organizations have to deal with.
Ultimately, it all boils down to one question: When there is a power outage, are you well-prepared to handle it or decide what’s best to do when things go awry? If you’ve picked the former choice, you’ve made a wise decision.
Every business needs an unerring IT disaster management plan to recover from any disruptive event. Generally, a good disaster management plan has four stages:
1. Prevention: To proactively prevent disruption by taking appropriate steps
2. Preparation: To implement safety guidelines
3. Mitigation: To minimize loss when disruptive incidents occur
4. Recovery: To return to normal workflow after the incident
Every passing minute after a turbulent incident means loss of money and reputation, causing irreversible consequences for your organization. A fail-proof plan with all four stages of disaster management will get your business back on its feet before you know it.
So, what are we waiting for? Let’s explore the steps to devise and implement a solid IT support plan to handle any outages.
12 Steps to Create an IT Support Plan to Handle Disruptive Outages
Step 1: Identify the components of a major disruptive incident
To begin with, determine how long each of your major systems can be down before there is a significant impact on your company. A user report or an automatically generated alert from a system monitoring tool can detect an issue. It is vital to know the risks associated with single points of failure, such as data loss.
You can assign a team to assess the following details:
- When did the incident start
- Impact of the problem
- The number of customers affected
- Data loss and other impacts
Are you still relying on old and outdated IT infrastructure? If yes, you’ve rolled the red carpet for cyber threats and a host of other security risks. It’s time to upgrade your infrastructure with the latest security and data backup measures. Remember that in the IT sector, “Prevention is better than loss.”
Step 2: Update your IT infrastructure
Are you still relying on old and outdated IT infrastructure? If yes, you’ve rolled the red carpet for cyber threats and a host of other security risks. It’s time to upgrade your infrastructure with the latest security and data backup measures. Remember that in the IT sector, “Prevention is better than loss.”
Step 3: Determine your critical business processes
Identify business processes that deserve top priority when disaster strikes. These will include procedures and applications crucial to your everyday workflow. This list will help you save the most critical aspects that keep your business running like clockwork.
Step 4: Arrange the 3 recovery objectives
Do not forget to set the following recovery objectives:
1. Recovery Point Objective (RPO): RPO is a recovery of the last restorable data backup. During the recovery period, any data generated between the event and the RPO will be lost.
2. Recovery Time Objective (RTO): RTO is the time between the event and recovery. During the RTO period, most of your system will not be operational.
3. Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD): The MTD helps determine RPO and RTO as well as the maximum amount of allowed data loss.
Step 5: Implement a File Integrity Monitoring solution
Use a File Integrity Monitoring solution (FIM) to detect changes and verify whether they are expected. Why do we say this? Numerous studies have shown that most network outages can be related to misconfigurations or changes made without prior verification or approval. As a result, it should figure high on your priority list of solutions to be implemented.
Step 6: Use automated response solutions
We are not living in ancient times to rely on only humans to deal with such disasters. Yes, you need your IT team, but it only makes sense to arm them with automated solutions that will react faster to these adverse developments. When critical workflow stops without warning, automation can restart the process and give you an alternative solution to compensate for the time loss.
Step 7: Create an automated alert and activation protocol
How will an automation alert help? Well, it is the fastest way to notify your IT staff of an outage and what each one should do thereon.
How will an activation protocol help? When a disastrous situation occurs, an activation protocol will help you notify the recovery personnel, key management staff, and stakeholders.
Step 8: Test, review, and update
There is no room for guesswork and carelessness in disaster management. To make your plan flawless, create a crisis checklist and distribute it to your disaster management squad. The next step is to test if your plan works. Simulate a crisis and implement your plan to identify the pitfalls and drawbacks. Re-plan, recheck and review until you perfect it. Document your findings and provide access to your recovery team.
Step 9: Train your personnel
Well-prepared plans are more likely to be successful. For a successful recovery team, it is essential to establish procedures and train the responsible personnel. Subject your team to intensive training at least once in three months, whether there is a major incident or not.
Step 10: Conduct an IT incident postmortem
As strange as it sounds, an IT incident postmortem is nothing but a post-review process that will help:
- Analyze the underlying causes that led to the incident
- Devise and implement preventional measures
- Analyze patterns and evaluate measures to prevent a recurrence
- Yield process improvements for better IT support
Step 11: Arm yourself with IT support tools
A reliable IT support process requires an armament of four types of tools:
- Monitoring tools to report issues as and when they happen
- Alerting tools to alert staff and update them on the actions and progress made
- Management tools to classify, organize, and report the incident
- Communication tools like text chat, video calls, shared emails, notes, and documents allow team members to communicate and collaborate toward a desirable outcome
Step 12: Invest in network and device monitoring software
Yes, it may be an extra investment, but a mandatory one. Network and device monitoring software gives you vital insights using statistical health information from your IT devices. This information is absolutely crucial to stay ahead of slowly developing network or device issues and deal with them at the earliest. Moreover, predictive monitoring is shown to mitigate outages, particularly those that affect operations.
What Do You Want: an Immediate Resolution or a Long-term Fix?
So, there you have it- 12 steps to plan a guaranteed, watertight IT support plan to rescue your business when there’s an unexpected disaster. But the question is whether your plan is an immediate resolution or a long-standing solution.
A resolution is generally understood as an IT support solution that alleviates the immediate problem for the business or customer. A resolution will, no doubt, end your emergency. However, only a stable, long-term solution will do all the additional cleanup after resolving the emergency.
The longer an outage goes unresolved, the more revenue and sensitive data you stand to lose. Therefore, a sustainable, reliable, and practically sensible IT support plan is what your organization needs to be up and running again, no matter what the disaster is!
Stay Up and Running with CMIT, Tempe
CMIT, Tempe, specializes in proactive solutions that monitor your IT assets and infrastructure round-the-clock. We are the go-to name for cyber security, IT support services, data backup and recovery, and other managed IT services. Contact our team and tell us your IT requirements today!
