Business Continuity

The CrowdStrike Incident: A Wake-Up Call for Operational Resilience

By Christian Kelly, CTO, Xantrion Inc. As Xantrion’s CTO, I’ve seen my fair share of IT incidents and system outages over the years. But the recent CrowdStrike incident stands out as a stark reminder of the risks inherent in our interconnected digital world. This event, which some are calling “the largest outage in the history of information technology,” offers crucial…

2024 Cybersecurity To-Do List

With increased regulatory pressure and mounting cybersecurity risks, it’s more important than ever to make sure you’ve got a robust cybersecurity program. This checklist will help you shape your 2024 cybersecurity strategy. DOWNLOAD INFOGRAPHIC Get a Free Cyber Risk Assessment

The Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Fires, floods, ransomware attacks, or pandemics, such as COVID-19, that prevent people from working in the office are all reasons your organization needs a disaster recovery plan. However, while thinking about how to recover from a disaster, don’t forget to include business continuity (a.k.a) disaster avoidance as a cost-effective element of your overall disaster recovery plan. What is the difference between…

Update your Business Continuity Plan for an Extended Pandemic – Just in Case

As some workplaces reopen and others make plans to do so, we may start seeing business as usual. However, if the coronavirus re-emerges over the summer or fall due to a decrease in social distancing and other factors, organizations will need to be prepared for a return to remote work and other pandemic-induced workplace changes.

Roles and Responsibilities of a Crisis Management Team

Companies facing a crisis — such as the current COVID-19 pandemic — must identify who will manage the company’s response. In many cases, this involves the creation of a crisis management team, which can help divvy up the many responsibilities.

The Five Most Important Files to Back Up

While regular backups are an important part of any disaster recovery plan, not every file on your system is mission critical. It’s always good practice to back up your systems daily, but often that isn’t practical or doable. Whether because of financial or time constraints, full backups often have to be done less frequently. So which files should you backup…

Select the Best Backup Solution for Your Business’s Laptops

Ever since laptops first came on the market there have been challenges reliably backing up the data to protect against loss or failure. The reality today is that laptop backup solutions are still not flawless and shouldn’t be exclusively relied on to limit the risks of data loss or corruption. For example: Manual backup (for example to USB) suffers both…

What does Downtime Really Cost your Business?

When preparing your technology budget, it is useful to know the costs associated with downtime. This information can help you prioritize IT expenditures so that critical systems and operations receive the funding needed to keep them running efficiently. Knowing the downtime costs can also motivate you to create business continuity and disaster recovery plans if you have not created them…

Data Backups vs. Replication: Which do you need?

Data backups and replication are both related to disaster recovery, but they aren’t the same thing. There are important differences in what they are used for and how they are set up. Only by understanding the differences can you determine whether your business needs just one solution or both of them. Data Backups Data backups involve copying both critical and…

Technology Move Tips – Minimize the Business Interruption and Hassle

Update your phone number Ensure you can transfer your current phone number(s), local phone service and features, such as voice mail, to your new location. If not, get new ones and arrange for call forwarding for at least 90 days. Ensure you can transfer your local long distance and long-distance services at the same time. This is usually a good…

Ransomware Infections Are Through The Roof: What Should you do?

The quick money to be made in ransomware scams appears to be driving furious innovation in the cybercrime world. A recent Trend Micro report stated that some cybercriminals have begun using macros and scripts, professional-looking phishing pages, and a computer’s master boot record to get victims to activate the malware on their computer systems. As a result, ransomware infections are…

Can Cloud Services Protect my Business from Disasters?

In our opinion, yes. In addition, cloud services are also the most cost-effective way to protect your business from disaster. When it comes to IT, there are two kinds of risks. One involves system failures, whether they’re caused by hardware, software, human error, or natural disaster. Minimizing these risks is called business continuity planning. The other involves the damage to…

How to Ensure your Data is Available When You Need It

The worst time to discover that your backup system isn’t working is when you’ve lost key information and need to recover it. Nowadays, there are as many ways to back up your data as there are ways to lose it. Products range from the venerable tape back up to hard drives to online backup services. No matter which product ends…

Online Backups: The Foundation for a Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery Plan

As long as you have a reliable, high-speed internet connection; select a reputable online backup service or managed service provider, that provides online backups for you. Online backups provide: • Instant offsite electronic data protection: Data is automatically moved offsite to a hardened storage facility (i.e. the facility has redundant internet connections, servers, and power and is constructed…