When technology fails, businesses go under. And if you’re like most organizations today, your business continuity is dependent on communications and networking infrastructure that carries the lifeblood of your business—data.

Your employees can’t serve your customers without it, nor can your mission critical applications continue to run. And for many businesses, a few days of downtime can meet shutting the doors. It’s essential to ensure maximum uptime so even if you do encounter a disruption, your customers never notice.

For small and medium-sized businesses, putting the checks and balances in place to guarantee business continuity can be overwhelming, and partnering with a managed services provider can ease the burden. Regardless of whether you outsource or scale up your IT team internally, there are four key ingredients you will need.

Data Protection

It doesn’t matter whether it’s through malicious intent or natural disaster—losing mission-critical data means a business can grind to a halt. You need a protection plan that encompasses all applications, files and databases to protect data in the event of human error, systems failure or corruption. This should include offsite data backup and recovery with comprehensive business continuity planning.

Secure Networking

Safeguarding data not only means protecting where it’s used and stored, but also while it’s in transit. Even if you don’t take advantage of a managed service provider’s expertise, you likely have data moving in and out of your primary location to cloud-based services, field offices or remote users. Securing these connections safeguards mission-critical data and applications, maintains service and performance targets, and protects against malicious threats.

Predictive Care

Maintaining all devices and equipment, including Wi-Fi endpoints, can be a daunting task and can monopolize the time of your IT staff. Outsourcing to a managed services provider who employs a predicative care model means you don’t have to worry about asset tracking, paying for onsite labour for repairs and replacement, or tangling with multiple vendors to get things reconfigured or fixed.

24 X 7 Support and Monitoring

Predicative care for devices can be complemented with comprehensive support and monitoring by a managed service provider, enabling you to tap a team of skilled support people across multiple shifts to cover your business users and their applications. Proactive monitoring keeps a watchful eye on your environment to prevent any potential issues that could lead a disruption.

Ensuring business continuity requires a lot of proactive planning and IT resources, but it’s better to invest the time and energy into preventative measures than paying the high cost of not doing it. A managed IT services provider can help you keep your business running smoothly by avoiding common errors and providing around-the-clock coverage with properly skilled staff.

If you haven’t begun to think about disaster recovery planning or feel your plan needs an update, check out our Disaster Recovery Primer.