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The 7 Irresistible Qualities of Cloud ERP
Learn why ERP tools are an critical component for many businesses.
Why a Business Continuity Plan is Essential
Learn why your company needs a business continuity plan.
Ransomware 101
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The top 5 reasons to prepare your business continuity plan
/in Blog, Business Continuity /by wpengineThe last thing you want is to go out of business in the event of an unforeseen circumstance. A business continuity plan is essential for modern businesses in any industry. Regardless of what kind of technology you use, think of this plan as a blueprint for keeping your business running in the event of a major disaster.
Disasters come in many forms, including natural disasters, human error, cyber attacks, and insider threats. The worst disasters always have the same effect: stopping your business dead in its tracks.
Sometimes, it’s hard to really conceptualize the importance of a continuity plan without looking at what happens if you don’t have one.
Take, for instance, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Urban legend has it that the conflagration started when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern in the family barn. The fire’s origin is debatable. The aftermath, however, is well documented and devastating by any standards.
The Great Chicago fire completely destroyed 3.2 miles in the heart of Chicago, rapidly consuming homes and businesses. The inferno resulted in the death of 300 citizens, the destruction of 17,500 buildings, Of the 300,000 residents of Chicago, 100,000 were left homeless.
The 185 firefighters employed within Chicago were ill-equipped to handle the ferocious spread of the fire, which was attributed to a drought as well as the mostly wooden construction of the city’s buildings, roads, and sidewalks.The total cost of the fire was estimated at $222 million, or roughly $4.6 billion today.
When a disaster this large happens, the only way for a business to survive is to have an understanding of what needs to be protected, how you want to respond, and which practices to follow to continue operations. Here are the 5 most important things to focus on when putting together a continuity plan.
1. Minimizing Downtime
The primary reason for a business continuity plan is to eliminate downtime. 75% of businesses don’t have any sort of business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan. Skipping out on a continuity plan is not only reckless, but extremely expensive.
ITIC’s latest survey data finds that 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000.Those aren’t numbers to be ignored. Whether you suffer a natural disaster or a cyber attack, the only way to stay in business is to continue your work as soon as possible. Otherwise, you may very well go out of business.
2. Protecting What’s Important
A business continuity plan should detail the necessary components and data that will keep your business running. This involves inventory of backup devices and cloud services, as well as an outline of your data backup specifics (when and where) and an overview of how company assets will be handled when disaster strikes.
3. Communicating with Confidence
One of the primary benefits of creating a business continuity plan is to establish a state of order amid the chaos. Your plan should focus on a chain-of-command delegation of responsibility, and should include reliable communication channels prioritized for contacting employees, partners and customers to minimize breakdowns in collaboration and service.
4. Resuming Operations
The goal of any business continuity plan is to get you back in business as soon as possible. Many companies have taken the extra precaution of utilizing backup and recovery sites. These are off-campus facilities where your business can be relocated to continue operations regardless of any damage or limited access you may experience.
These sites run the gamut from “cold sites”, which are bare-boned facilities without any installed operations, to “hot sites”, which are exact duplicates of your current operations.
5. Ensuring Your Recovery
A recent report finds that 60% of small businesses close within 6 months of a significant cyber attack. But this doesn’t have to be you. Implementing a business continuity plan to your current backup and data recovery solutions will allow you the peace of mind that even if disaster strikes, you don’t have to become a statistic.
We Are Here to Help
CCS Technology Group would be happy to help your business create a specific business continuity plan. We have proven experience developing solutions that will keep you in business no matter what outside forces may arrive.
It’s important to plan ahead. It might just save your business.
Give us a call or send us a message to learn more.
Star Wars is basically an ad for ERP systems
/in Blog, Productivity /by wpengineWe’ve all seen the commercial where the entire concept is “Don’t do X or you’re totally doomed. Do Y instead.” Like, some guy picks up a can of generic beer and he’s lonely and depressed, but then he grabs a Bud Light and he’s surrounded by beautiful women and fancy cars. That kind of commercial.
Well, it turns out that the Star Wars saga is basically a cautionary tale for what happens if you don’t use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Here’s why…
1. It’s an ERP!
Every time any jedi in Star Wars wants to get anything done, they have to hop in a starfighter and zip from planet to planet. You would think with an entire galaxy to protect, they might create some sort of proprietary ERP system to save the jedis some precious time and fuel.
Example: Obi-Wan needs to jet off to planet Kamino to check up on some poisonous dart and then finds that the Republic invested tons of money in clones. RED FLAG!
With an ERP system, all resources in your business are live. If $50,000 is spent by your clone recruitment department, you’re going to be able to pull that information on the fly and save yourself a trip across the galaxy – not to mention saving those funds for lightsaber components and blue milk.
Tracking live resources is one of the most important parts of any fast-moving business, and so is communication.
When you utilize an ERP system optimized for your operations and priorities, your departments have a vehicle for interdepartmental coordination, communication and efficiency. The reduced payroll hours and added transparency ERP delivers creates an immediate reporting channel and enhances efficiency throughout your business.
This can mean big savings and profits. Businesses using an ERP saw an average increase in profitability of 10% over two years in a recent Aberdeen study. Additionally, 96% of the top-performing companies experiencing growth rely on ERP solutions.
2. Use the ERP, Luke…
Arguably, the greatest tragedy in the Star Wars saga is that the friendship and guidance of Obi-Wan is not enough to save Anakin from joining the dark side of the Force. Obi-Wan, clouded by his good intentions, is unable to see the dangerous path his friend has followed. This, of course, leads to the death of Padme, the birth of Vader, and years of chaos and destruction for our favorite galaxy far, far away.
If you are fortunate in your business, you are probably so busy that you don’t have time to crunch numbers and run manual reports, or to update forecasts based on these predictions. The good news is that unlike Obi-Wan, you can make good use of an ERP system to keep your forecasts regular and current.
ERP systems gather live data for your reporting requirements, and it can predict future patterns based on this data. From anticipating office expenses to scaling workforce resources to predicting network traffic patterns, capturing and analyzing this information in real time according to your operational KPIs is priceless when planning for your business growth.
3. The ERP is strong with this one…
When you utilize ERP systems, you also benefit from scalability. Both the Empire and the Republic suffered from gross inefficiencies.
The Republic had a bunch of clones sitting on a planet working out and training, not knowing how many they would need. They then needed to rush production on hundreds of thousands more to fight the Empire’s drone forces.
With a proper ERP system, the Republic could have used forecasting to know how many soldiers they would need for each battle, and then they could have scaled quickly and efficiently to deliver the right amount and type of soldiers. Why send 20,000 to each planet when 200 would do?
Just shoot us a message or give us a call, and we can chat about how to support and optimize your business operations with the right ERP capabilities.
May the Force be with you…
Aerosmith and the art of rockin’ IT solutions
/in Blog, Managed Services /by wpengine“Tell me how it is that you can sleep in the night, without thinking you lost everything that was good in your life to the toss of the dice?” – Aerosmith, “What it Takes”, (Pump, 1989)
Steven Tyler totally has the right idea on the song “What it Takes”. You never want to roll the dice when it comes to IT solutions. Inspired by some of Aerosmith’s greatest tracks, here’s a setlist of rockin’ IT solutions for your office.
Dream On
Ever catch yourself daydreaming, head in the clouds? In your business, that’s not a bad idea. Introducing a cloud-based solution to your business will help you streamline your workplace systems, improve your operation and reduce overhead costs.
Right Scale reports that “Companies now run 79 percent of workloads in cloud, with 41 percent of workloads in public cloud and 38 percent in private cloud.”
Cloud solutions allow for ease of installation, lower payroll hours, and scalability for growing businesses. Those are pretty impressive stats, right? If you know anyone in business who thinks they can move forward without incorporating cloud solutions, you can probably tell them to “dream on.”
Just Push Play
Often, apps exist that are perfect for your business. When they aren’t, you need the capability to develop your own apps that are customized to fit your specific business needs.
App creation is also super beneficial when accounting for the increase in employees who need to be able to work from mobile devices. The proliferation of mobile apps in business actually casts a shadow on those not yet in the app game. Adobe reports that “61% of organizations believe that if a company hasn’t deployed any enterprise mobile apps yet they’re at a competitive disadvantage”.
Whether you’re building internal apps for specialized workflow or customer-facing applications to better engage clients, the goal is to create something that fits your business so well that all you have to do is “just push play” and you are ready to get to work.
Back in the Saddle
Picture this: It’s a sold-out stadium show for Aerosmith. Steven Tyler saunters out and takes center stage, his ego boosted by the adoring applause of tens of thousands of fans. Joe Perry follows suit, retrieving his beautiful Les Paul Gibson guitar from its stand. And it’s totally busted. For some reason, the roadie forgot to string the guitar. It’s sitting there with one D string, the other five tucked away somewhere backstage or on the tour bus. What’s a rock star to do?
This is a situation that happens often with technology, particularly if you have been handling your own system backup and software maintenance.
What would Joe Perry do? He’d do the same thing any IT team would suggest. He’d reach for his backup. If you’re Joe Perry, that means you reach for one of the other 600 guitars in your collection. If you’re a business owner, you need your own redundancies in place to keep the business going if your systems are interrupted for technical or human reasons, which can vary from the mundane to the criminal.
In fact, you may even want to work with your IT team to add a foolproof disaster recovery plan for any situation to the list of your IT solutions and you’ll be “back in the saddle” in no time.
We would be happy to jam with you about more ways to incorporate rockin’ IT solutions into your business. Feel free to give us a call or shoot us an email.