Posts Tagged ‘Webinar’

Helpful Resource for Protecting Your Business

Thursday, February 4th, 2016
Datto Webinar

Datto Webinar

I would like to thank everyone who participated in yesterday’s webinar “5 Keys to Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan for SMBs” and express my thanks to Datto for making it possible to share this important information. We had over 600 small and medium businesses register for the webinar. Upon registration, participants received a “Risk IQ” test that I developed as a self-assessment tool. We began the webinar by reviewing each of the ten questions in the test with some surprise answers. Such exercises can help to raise awareness that we tend to under-estimate risks. At the conclusion of the webinar, participants were invited to use a free tool from Datto that helps to calculate the hourly cost of a business disruption. We also made available a checklist of steps to get started on the way to business continuity planning. And, of course, we are available, along with the managed service providers, to help businesses implement their continuity plans. The webinar was recorded, so participants can go back and re-watch it as often as they need to do so, and offer this resource to their employees and future hires. If you were unable to participate in the live webinar, please register here and you will be given a link to the recording and all of the free tools that were made available. And be sure to listen to the accompanying podcast for additional information.

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Getting Started with Business Continuity

Sunday, January 31st, 2016
Risky Business

Risky Business

The toughest challenge in any new process is taking the first step. Once you have started the work, you can build momentum to carry forward. Let’s consider how to get started with business continuity planning. First and foremost, you must consider human safety. Begin by considering plans to ensure the safety of your employees and their families in the event of a disruption to your normal operations. Do you have basic safety measures at your place of work? Can you put together an evacuation plan that you will implement on a moment’s notice if called to leave your workplace?

This process is important for many reasons, including the opportunity to secure buy-in from your employees to contribute to what they may perceive as an increase in their responsibilities. Share with them the thinking and methodology behind the planning process and how applying this approach in their homes can enhance the safety of their households and extended families. Engage all of the stakeholders in your company in the planning process, such as your suppliers, your neighbors, your service providers and others in your community. The ability of your company to stay up and running in a disaster is dependent, in part, of the ability of others to perform their responsibilities even in challenging and unexpected circumstances.

Next, start to assess the key assets of your business. This is not as easy as it first appears and the results of this process may trigger some surprising insights that can position your business for even greater success. Here is an example from my own experience: a neighboring business won a $25 million contract to do app development for a financial data provider. When their building burned to the ground, they were able to safely evacuate all of their people and insurance covered the cost of replacing their computers and furniture.

But the key asset of this business was not its physical property; it was the intellectual property – the hundreds of thousands of lines of software code that its developers and programmers had written for the financial client. They had failed to back up their code offsite and so lost everything.

This is an important insight because in a service and knowledge economy, our most important assets are often intangible, such as intellectual property or even reputation for stellar customer service. So begin by identifying those assets and how you might protect them.

Then it is time to perform due diligence on your own company and closely examine your own processes and procedures. You need to develop operational manuals to document what you do to systematize your processes. Even the most experienced pilots develop checklists as, in stressful conditions, it is too easy to overlook a critical procedure. As you consider your work processes, you will inevitably discover ways to improve upon them. More importantly, putting formal procedures and systems in place will help to scale and grow the business – and reduce the level of demands made upon the business owner with the stress that accompanies those demands.

I will be sharing these and other approaches to small business risk resilience in an interactive webinar offered by Datto’s and scheduled for February 4, 2015 at 2:00 p.m. EST. To register for the webinar, please click here. Upon registration, you will receive a “Risk IQ Test” to see if your framework properly estimates the risks to which small businesses are exposed! We will begin our webinar by sharing our findings and conclude our webinar with resources for follow-up support and a blueprint that small businesses can use to begin simple measures to protect their businesses. I hope you will join us!

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Making the Case for Investment in Business

Friday, January 22nd, 2016
Risky Business

Risky Business

In the last post in this series, I presented a new framework for risk to help small business owners better assess the likelihood of experiencing the “everyday disasters” and appreciate the need for implementing business continuity measures. However, we all have lists of things we need to do, but fail to follow through as other matters assume priority. So the next step in our process to enable small business disaster resilience is to make the business case for the financial returns to business continuity programs.

Many people mistakenly believe that an investment in business continuity programs only pays off in the {unlikely} event that disaster strikes. Nothing could be further from the truth. A well-structured continuity plan will improve the profitability of the business even if disaster never strikes. Sharing this insight with the owners small and mid-sized businesses will help to motivate a greater sense of urgency to protect their businesses and raise the priority of investment in continuity planning in an appropriate way.

Let’s consider three specific ways in which continuity planning improves the profitability of the business. The first driver of profitability is the reduction in the cost of risk. A well-structured plan offers the opportunity to reduce the cost of insuring the business, with lowered premiums commensurate with improved risk management practices. Speaking from the experience of my own business, I was able to lower my commercial insurance premiums by more than ten per cent by sharing my continuity plan with my insurance carrier and even soliciting feedback and input from my insurer for suggestions as to how I might improve upon that plan, based on their institutional knowledge. The reduced insurance expense alone covered my up-front expense in data protection and other measures to ensure resilience.

The second manner in which continuity planning yields a positive return on investment arises from expanded market and procurement opportunities. I connection with their business continuity planning, large enterprises are re-evaluating the resilience of their supply chains. Their due diligence on prospective vendors explicitly considers the risks associated with their ability to meet their deliverables in the event of unexpected disruptions. Small and mid-sized businesses that have continuity measures in place are more competitive to win contracts and grow their revenues.

This is also true of public procurement. While government contracting officers do not always explicitly ask about continuity planning when they issue RFP’s, the form for response nearly always includes a section to address quality measures. This is the forum where I like to write about the measures in place to allow for consistent, reproducible results in uncertain conditions. This allows me to convey that awarding a competitive contract to my company is less risky than awarding it to a competitor owing, in part, to our thoughtful continuity planning.

The third, and most powerful manner in which continuity planning drives profitability is the creation of more robust systems that emerge from a continuity plan. Taking measures to protect your business requires that you begin with performing due diligence on your company. Can you identify your key assets? Are you able to document your business processes? Often as entrepreneurs start their businesses, they have informal, ad hoc and improvised ways of doing things. Effective continuity planning requires that you put systems in place for consistent results even in challenging conditions. Those systems will become a platform that will enable you to scale and grow your business. And as you undertake an examination of your company to determine how best to protect it, you will inevitably discover opportunities to do things differently – and more profitably.

I will be sharing these and other approaches to small business risk resilience in an interactive webinar offered by Datto’s and scheduled for February 4, 2015 at 2:00 p.m. EST. To register for the webinar, please click here. Upon registration, you will receive a “Risk IQ Test” to see if your framework properly estimates the risks to which small businesses are exposed! We will begin our webinar by sharing our findings and conclude our webinar with resources for follow-up support and a blueprint that small businesses can use to begin simple measures to protect their businesses. I hope you will join us!

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Getting Small Businesses to Think About the Unthinkable

Wednesday, January 20th, 2016
It is all relative

Risky Business

Trusted advisors to small businesses, such as managed service providers (“MSP’s”), know the importance of enabling robust business continuity plans. As tech-savvy professionals, we are familiar with the depressing numbers:

  • Over 75 per cent of small businesses experience some level of data loss
  • 80 per cent of data interruptions can close a business for at least a day

Yet surveys of small business conducted by local chapters of the American Red Cross consistently find that two-thirds or more of small businesses fail to implement even basic continuity measures.

Why is it so hard to convince small businesses to protect their businesses, starting with basic data protection?

The answer, in my experience, is that most small business owners have a distorted assessment of risk. They believe that disasters will not strike them. In most cases they are right: extreme events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and the like, are, by definition, high-severity/low-probability events. It hardly makes sense for a small business owner to divert his or her limited time and financial resources to address a low-probability threat when there are immediate needs, such as making payroll, that must be met.

The manner in which disasters are reported contributes to this distorted risk perception and false sense of security. The television news will broadcast vivid images of extreme weather, but since a computer virus decimating a hard drive is not visually interesting, it will not receive the same attention although, for the small business, it represents the greater threat.

That is why enabling small business resilience begins with reframing our perception of risk.  Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses presents a framework for risk analysis along a continuum of threats. At one extreme, we have the high-frequency/low-severity risks. These are the “everyday disasters”, such as human error, computer crashes and the like. At the other extreme, we have the high-severity/low-frequency disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and other major hazards.

Conventional wisdom suggests that we should prepare for the extreme event, the worst-case scenario, and that subsumes preparedness for all lesser threats. That view generally holds true, but it should never form the basis of continuity planning for small businesses. Focusing on the catastrophic risks tends to induce complacency, as most business owners recognize that, by definition, they won’t likely experience an earthquake that measures 9.0 on the Richter scale. It also induces fear and paralysis, as small businesses cannot reasonably take all measures to protect themselves against terrorism and other threats.

A better approach is to begin by preparing for the high-frequency risks, the “everyday disasters”. This approach offers an immediate benefit against a more imminent risk at a more reasonable cost. And it gradually builds resilience against the more serious threats. The data backup the small business needs to recover a file mistakenly deleted by human error (the most common form of disaster) will be critical to the recovery from a more serious hazard.

So let’s begin to enable small business resilience by changing our risk framework. This approach will allow us to better serve small businesses. In the next blog posting in this series, I will discuss how to take this new risk framework and translate it into a more compelling business case for continuity planning.

I will be sharing these and other approaches to small business risk resilience in an interactive webinar offered by Datto’s and scheduled for February 4, 2015 at 2:00 p.m. EST. To register for the webinar, please click here. Upon registration, you will receive a “Risk IQ Test” to see if your framework properly estimates the risks to which small businesses are exposed! We will begin our webinar by sharing our findings and conclude our webinar with resources for follow-up support and a blueprint that small businesses can use to begin simple measures to protect their businesses. I hope you will join us!

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