News Radio 570 WWNC's Gregg Jensen speaks with TSAChoice's Will Arledge during the weekly feature Tech Talk, broadcast on Tuesday mornings at 8:43 AM. Today, Gregg and Will discuss changes around YouTube.

Click here to listen to the podcast on WWNC's website.

News Radio 570 WWNC's Gregg Jensen speaks with TSAChoice's Will Arledge during the weekly feature Tech Talk, broadcast on Tuesday mornings at 8:43 AM. Today, Gregg and Will discuss the digital currency, Bitcoin.

Click here to listen to the podcast on WWNC's website.

News Radio 570 WWNC's Morning Report with Gregg Jensen continues the weekly feature Tech Talk, broadcast on Tuesday mornings at 8:43 AM.  Today, Gregg and Will talk through a brief history of cell phones, and the upcoming HTC Facebook Phone.

Click here to listen to the podcast on WWNC's website.

Following up on our recent discussion about planning for disaster recovery, today we’re going to expand on that theme and talk about the “whole enchilada,” of which disaster recovery is but one ingredient.  Business continuity is the practice of keeping your business running through both minor hiccups and major catastrophes, and it encompasses a wide range of topics.

Mobility

We’re all humans in this Age of Information, which means we’ve got on-demand access to just about everything we can think of on lots of different devices – movie times, pizza delivery, and cat videos all come to mind.  Mobility has become far more than a buzzword; it’s literally now how we live with technology every single day. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, and soon maybe even tables and walls link us to both play and work everywhere we go.  Remote workers can turn a spare room at home into a fully-functional corporate office space by combining technologies like Mitel’s Mobility solutions and Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop.  Simply put, in this day and age, for many people there is no such thing as “out of the office.”

Virtualization

By now everyone has at least a passing knowledge of what virtualization is and why they need it (and if you don’t or if you just need a refresher, you can read about it here.  In a nutshell, virtualization technology breaks the traditional dependency of software on the underlying hardware on which it runs, and allows for much greater deployment flexibility and better strategies for ensuring server and application uptime.

Data and System Protection

Of course, because we are only human, we make mistakes every day.  Most of these aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things, like forgetting your coffee in the car or getting immersed in your favorite website after your lunch hour ends.  We’ve all accidentally deleted a file, or saved over changes that we realized later didn’t need to be made.  Most firms have some form of backup in place (yours certainly does – right?) and it’s usually no problem to pop in a tape or log on to a cloud backup service and pull down last night’s copy of the file.  A little extra work later and you’re back where you need to be.

Sometimes it’s a little less trivial than an errant mouse-click.  A hardware failure on a critical system can quickly endanger the smooth operation of your business.  And with computers being what they are – complex machines with lots of moving parts – failures can happen in a number of ways: hard drives can give out, or power surges can overload the power supplies or take out network interfaces.  Fortunately, the potentially disastrous effects of most conceivable failures can be mitigated easily with a little simple planning: configuring drives in a RAID array, utilizing redundant power supplies, and buying adequate surge protection and battery backup all eliminate single points of failure and greatly reduce the likelihood of a lone unwanted event taking out a system or the precious data on it.

Internet Redundancy

The cost per megabit of high-speed Internet has plummeted dramatically in recent years, and the speeds only continue to increase.  For less than the price of a T-1 line (which is gradually transitioning to a place in the annals of Internet lore) businesses can now subscribe to fiber service providing up to 100 times the speed of a T-1, with some cash left over for a smaller backup line like DSL or PRI.  These can be tied together with a Sonicwall firewall appliance to provide near-instant failover in the event that the primary Internet line goes down, as well as automatic failback for when it returns to service.

Disaster Recovery

Since we covered this in depth in our last article, there won’t be a lot of detail here.  Disaster recovery is the “worst-case scenario” in the business-continuity spectrum, and consequently it requires the most forethought and planning to execute properly.  Disaster recovery goes well beyond just bits and bytes, though – it is a comprehensive discipline that involves the identification and delegation of personnel, responsibilities and timeframes when the unthinkable happens.  And if your plan isn’t sound, your recovery won’t be either.

Rolling Everything Together

Of course, this very likely seems like a daunting task juggling all these different items and making sure you’re addressing everything properly.  But in reality, these all just involve lots of little “ingredients” in that “whole enchilada.”  Some of them, like protecting your systems and data, are crucial ingredients (the beans, meat and cheese); others, like mobility, simply make life a little better (the guacamole).  Disaster recovery requires a bit more planning than the others, of course, but in the end it too essentially breaks down into baby steps.

If you’ve never approached business continuity from a high level before, we urge you to take the time and do it as soon as possible.  How do you go about it without overwhelming your mind?  Identify your critical business needs first – the “what.”  Ask yourself, “What happens if I: …can’t send email?  …access my CRM application?  …use my CAD software?”  From there you can drill down into the “how, when, where and who.”  And of course, we can help you wade through the unknowns – so you can focus on how to just keep swimming.

News Radio 570 WWNC's Morning Report Gregg Jensen special report about Cyber Security, Saturday, March 16th.  Gregg chats with Dave Baker about Cyber Security, Malware, Spyware.

Click here to listen to the podcast on the WWNC website