Would Your Business Survive an Internet Blackout?

During the “great Facebook outage of 2021” earlier this week, small companies that depend heavily on the social media giant got a wake-up call: “What if that had been our business?” This suggests that many small businesses that depend on information technology might need to consider extending their reach via alternative channels and redundant IT solutions.

The outage was triggered by modifications made to Facebook’s backbone routers, which manage network traffic across the company’s data centers. In a statement, Facebook said the outage was caused by a “cascading impact” on the way its data centers communicated.

What A Channel Like Facebook Represents to Small Business Owners

For merchants, around 30% of profits come from social commerce, while another 30% to 40% are generated through e-marketplaces. Relying too much on a single channel has risks.

Social media, e-marketplaces, and merchants’ websites are the three primary online sales channels. In terms of sales channels for small firms, Facebook accounts for approximately 30% of them, adding that companies may now need to look into alternative sales channels.

For other types of businesses, like logistics companies having the inability to direct where their products go, or dentists not being able to view patient data, this poses a very real potential disaster.

Do you know what it means for you if your system goes down?

A lack of business continuity may be catastrophic for your company if you experience downtime.

An operational outage may rapidly develop from an internal crisis to a supply chain ripple effect, hurting your image and costing you revenue. It’s impossible for your workers to do their duties if your system is down. You can’t provide what you promise to your clients if your workers aren’t able to perform their duties. It’s also impossible to obtain the money to purchase from suppliers if your product does not sell. If you want to maintain trust in your company, you need a business continuity strategy.

Even though downtime is an unavoidable expense for every company, neglecting to prepare for an unanticipated outage may be financially disastrous. Any delay, even for a single hour, may cause thousands of dollars in losses in damage and opportunity costs, as well as a reduction in profits. Statistically, only 10% of companies without a BCDR strategy survive a catastrophe, so your downtime could have a significant impact on your company’s long-term viability.

An unintended side effect of an IT failure is the reputational harm it could cause; Customers are much more likely to see you as a risky and untrustworthy partner if your company is not prepared for a possible catastrophe. Destroying client relationships or your company’s reputation has an impact on your profits, as well as your ability to recruit future business and talent.

With penalties upwards of $20 million for losing personal data, your company can’t afford to go without a backup and BCDR plan.

What Should You Do Now?

Identify situations that may result in catastrophe

IT disasters may take one of two forms for most businesses:

• A system outage happens when a critical component of your network or application fails, leaving you or your services unavailable for some time. Getting back online with just a few transactions affected makes this the easiest point to recover from.
• A data loss occurs when you lose material or information (your own or that of a customer.) The net breach, in which all copies of backups were destroyed, shows that data loss isn’t always recoverable.

Understanding your risk profile for these frequent kinds of outages is the first step in ensuring you’re prepared for a catastrophe. How important is it for your company to have such capabilities? Is there a risk of data loss in the event of an outage? What else might cause a data loss situation? Etc.

Keep in mind that the most common cause of both kinds of catastrophes is human mistakes.

Analyze the harm that may be done to your company.

To do this, IT and other top executives must work closely together. It’s important to know how the downtime or loss of different kinds of data can impact your company as a whole, and utilizing the knowledge of an IT provider such as Rush Tech Solutions can assist with coming up with and implementing a plan to help prepare.

Aim to understand how business-critical applications are dependent on each other in these conversations, and clarify how outages will affect your employees as well as how much money your company will lose for every minute of downtime. For example, you may need the payment processing app to be live, but does it also need the inventory app to function?

These are some useful comparisons:

• How long your company may be down before suffering significant harm is known as RTO (recovery time objective). Plan for the restoration of company operations by the RTO you specify in your disaster recovery (DR) strategy.
• You may go for a long time between data backups without having a major impact on your company operations, according to RPO (recovery point objective). Your RPO will be determined by the results of your business interruption study. To put it another way, if your disaster recovery (DR) strategy asks for recovering data from the most recent backup, the RPO specifies how far back that backup may be.

The purpose of these exercises is to shed light on how much downtime your business can bear so that a suitable DR strategy can be developed.

Consider Contacting a Managed Service Provider

In case you don’t want to experience a long blackout as Facebook did, you should consider contacting a IT service provider such as Rush Tech Solutions. Rush Tech Solutions provides peace-of-mind to clients from Atlanta to Athens. By first sitting down with their clients and listening to their concerns and objectives, the experienced and knowledgeable team then designs a tailored plan that fits each client’s needs.

If you would like to implement a disaster recovery plan, or just want to make sure yours is capable of handling potential downtime, please contact Rush Tech Solutions at (470)210-RUSH (7874), or by visiting their website at https://www.rushtechsolutions.com.