Could Your Business Keep Running During an IT Outage?
Imagine arriving at work tomorrow and discovering nobody can access email.
Then you realise the shared files aren’t available either.
Your phones aren’t working properly, employees can’t access key applications and customers are beginning to call asking what is happening.
What would your business do next?
Most organisations spend a lot of time thinking about how technology helps them work faster. Far fewer spend enough time considering what happens when that technology suddenly isn’t available.
That’s where IT resilience comes in.
What Is Business IT Resilience?
IT resilience is your organisation’s ability to keep operating, or recover quickly, when technology fails or becomes unavailable.
That disruption could be caused by:
- an internet outage
- hardware failure
- a cyber attack
- ransomware
- human error
- power failure
- a cloud service outage
- damaged equipment
- a supplier issue
The important point is that business continuity shouldn’t depend on everything working perfectly all of the time.
Problems happen.
A resilient business has already considered what happens next.
Downtime Is More Than an IT Problem
When a system stops working, the impact quickly moves beyond the IT department. If email isn’t available, communication becomes difficult. If your CRM goes offline, sales teams may lose access to customer information. If connectivity fails, cloud applications, phones and payment systems could all be affected. If files become inaccessible, employees may be unable to continue working at all.
The National Cyber Security Centre’s latest guidance on highly disruptive cyber incidents warns that the consequences of major technology disruption can extend beyond IT to customers, services, supply chains, finances and reputation. Recovery from a serious incident can potentially take weeks or even months.
That is why IT resilience needs to be considered as a business issue, not simply a technical one.
Start by Identifying What You Can’t Work Without
Not every system is equally important.
If the printer stops working for an hour, it might be inconvenient.
If your entire customer database disappears, that’s a very different problem.
Start by identifying the systems your organisation genuinely relies on.
That might include:
- internet connectivity
- Microsoft 365
- business telephone systems
- CRM software
- accounting platforms
- customer portals
- databases
- cloud applications
- shared documents
- line-of-business software
Then ask a simple question:
How long could we realistically operate without this?
For some systems, the answer may be several days.
For others, it could be less than an hour.
Understanding the difference helps you prioritise where resilience is most important.
Your Internet Connection Is Now Business-Critical
A few years ago, an internet outage might simply have meant losing access to Google for a while. That isn’t the case for most businesses anymore. Email is in the cloud. Files are in the cloud. Telephone systems are increasingly internet-based. CRM platforms, customer portals, accounting tools and collaboration platforms all depend on connectivity. An unreliable internet connection can therefore affect a significant proportion of your business simultaneously. Businesses should consider both the quality of their primary connection and what happens if it fails. For some organisations, having a secondary connection or mobile failover can provide an important additional layer of resilience.
The right approach depends on how dependent your organisation is on connectivity and how costly downtime would be.
Backups Are Important, but Can You Actually Restore Them?
Most businesses know they should back up their data.
The more important question is:
When did you last test whether you could restore it?
A backup you cannot recover from isn’t particularly useful.
The NCSC recommends regularly backing up essential information and testing those backups to make sure information can actually be restored when needed.
Your backup strategy should consider:
- what information needs protecting
- how frequently it changes
- how often backups run
- where those backups are stored
- who has access to them
- how quickly information can be restored
- what happens if your main environment is compromised
Recovery should be part of the plan from the beginning.
What Happens If Microsoft 365 Goes Down?
Cloud platforms provide businesses with huge advantages, but moving services to the cloud doesn’t eliminate the need for continuity planning.
Ask your team:
How would employees communicate if email or Teams were unavailable?
Do key employees have alternative contact details?
Could people access important telephone numbers elsewhere?
Are critical documents available through another method?
Who would communicate with customers?
These questions may sound excessive when everything is working normally.
During an outage, they become extremely important.
Don’t Forget Your Phone System
Your telephone system is another part of business resilience that is easy to overlook.
If customers couldn’t call you tomorrow, how would they get in touch?
Modern hosted communications platforms can provide flexibility that traditional telephone systems couldn’t, including options for working from different locations and devices.
However, your wider resilience strategy still matters.
Your telephony, internet connection, local network and employee devices all form part of the same technology environment.
Looking at them separately can leave unexpected gaps.
Cyber Security and Business Continuity Go Together
Not every IT outage is a cyber attack.
But increasingly, organisations need to consider cyber incidents as part of their business continuity planning.
The NCSC recommends businesses understand their critical systems, assign responsibilities and document who needs to be involved when an incident occurs.
That means knowing things such as:
Who makes the decision to shut a system down?
Who contacts your IT provider?
Who communicates with employees?
Who updates customers?
Where are emergency contact details stored?
What services need restoring first?
The worst time to decide these things is while an incident is already happening.
Five Questions Every Business Should Be Able to Answer
You don’t need a 100-page disaster recovery document to start improving resilience.
Begin with these five questions:
1. What are our most critical systems?
Identify the technology without which your organisation would struggle to operate.
2. How quickly could we restore our data?
Don’t just assume backups are working. Test them.
3. What happens if our main internet connection fails?
Consider whether your organisation needs a backup connectivity option.
4. Who is responsible during an IT incident?
Employees should know who to contact and who has authority to make decisions.
5. How do we contact our IT provider if our normal systems aren’t working?
Keep important contact information somewhere accessible even if your usual systems are offline.
Resilience Is About Preparing Before Something Goes Wrong
Good IT shouldn’t just help your business work efficiently on a normal day.
It should also help your business cope when something unexpected happens.
That means thinking about connectivity, cloud services, backups, cyber security, communications and support as part of one wider strategy.
At Silver Lining, we work with businesses to build technology environments that aren’t only designed to perform, but to remain dependable when circumstances change.
From managed IT and cloud solutions to connectivity, communications, backup and cyber security, having the right foundations can make recovering from disruption considerably easier.
If you’re not sure how long your business could operate during an IT outage, speak to Silver Lining about reviewing your current setup and identifying potential weak points.