A recent survey revealed that the majority of small businesses are cautiously optimistic and making fewer cut-backs in technology investments compared to mid-market and enterprise-sized companies.  The survey was a collaborative effort between Millward Brown, Research International and Lightspeed Research.  According to their findings, larger companies are much more focused on short-term challenges, such as lowered budgets and reduced staff, while smaller organizations are planning an increase in technology expenditures over the next 12 months.

“Small companies are seemingly more resilient and optimistic regarding the future, while many larger companies are struggling to adapt within an environment of hiring and spending freezes and cut backs,” said Steve Ingledew, managing director for Millward Brown's North American Technology Practice.

The survey intrigued me as the results show that smaller businesses (which represent the vast majority of clients we work with) are continuing to invest in technology as part of their plan to remain competitive and prosper during the current economic climate.  In fact, as challenging as we may be finding the current business climate, it may provide smaller businesses with an ideal opportunity to level the playing field when competing with larger companies who are finding it more difficult to adapt, and leverage technology, during these times.
The introduction of the personal computer began a revolution that decreased the cost of computerization and provided smaller businesses the opportunity to automate many of their processes; thereby improving productivity and increasing their competitiveness.  As this survey indicates, by leveraging technology, smaller businesses are once again in a position to be more flexible and adaptable than their larger competitors.  Relatively inexpensive investments in computer technology can be the ‘secret weapon’ for small business to not only survive this volatile period, but to thrive.

In this newsletter we are including a couple of articles that I hope you find useful food for thought in terms of how you might better leverage the computer technology that you already own and, perhaps as importantly, how to protect it in the event of disaster.

In last fall’s issue of The Advisor we ran a fairly brief announcement about our website content management software and services.  Clients who have engaged us to implement content management on their website have been extremely happy with the results.  In case you missed it, or aren’t aware of the benefits of content management software, we are publishing a brief article to explain how we help clients to independently keep their websites more current without having to pay an outside service to do it for them.

I don’t want to add anymore doom and gloom to what you’re already getting on a daily basis but we have become critically aware that many businesses, especially SMBs (Small- to Medium-Size Businesses), have no formal plans in place to recover from a disaster.  Certainly, most of you are taking regular backups of your data—and storing them offsite we hope—but in the event of a disaster such as a fire, flood or power outage lasting more than a day, how long would it take to be back to business as usual?

Statistics show that 43% of businesses who faced such dire circumstances without a business continuity plan went out of business as a result.  We have included an article in this issue to get you thinking about what you’d do if the unthinkable happened.

As always, if you have any comments or feedback regarding information in this newsletter, ideas for future articles, or our services in general, please write to me at paul.lambert@pcconsulting.ca.

We are honoured to have recently been recognized by Sage Software for outstanding customer service and received Sage’s Customer Excellence Award for 2008.  The recognition is a result of a year-long program sponsored by Sage Software called the Sage Customer Loyalty Project in which participating business partners’ customers were surveyed. The results of the survey for P.C. Consulting confirmed a satisfaction level amongst its customers more than double the industry average.

Almost every business has a web presence today with varying degrees of success.  Many businesses have found that their web site has added a new and hugely profitable dimension to their business.  However, in many cases, the initial investment and ongoing cost of maintenance has also been huge.  Others have virtually forgotten that their web site exists and left it to become stale with old and outdated information, providing little or no reason for anyone to revisit.  Like any good business investment, you want to ensure that your web site is providing you with a reasonable return by helping to generate more business, better service to your clients and differentiating you from your competitors.

An up-to-date web site can keep everyone—clients, prospects, suppliers, stakeholders, and staff—interested and enthusiastic about your business.  And, keeping your web site fresh helps to ensure that customers will return to it regularly to see what’s new.  However, keeping a web site up-to-date can be a real struggle; especially if there’s extra maintenance or updating costs involved. 

One of the biggest impediments to keeping a web site current is not being able to make the changes as soon as you see the need.  You may want to modify text or add new content, but calling a programmer every time you want to make a revision can be inconvenient and costly.  If you’re like most people you want to make the changes immediately and as conveniently as possible.

We help our clients do just that by installing content management software for them and configuring it to allow them to easily change their web site content.

Imagine that you only have ten minutes before having to rush out the door.  You log onto your web site, add an announcement about your upcoming open house, perhaps even modify your weekly featured product or service with an updated photo.  With content management software it can be that easy!  No more e-mails back and forth to your web host or programmer to make changes that you don’t have complete control over.  If you make your changes and later decide that you want to format a few words in a bold font for impact, just pop back in, format, save and you’re done.

A major advantage of using content management software is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage.  Once it’s installed, it’s as easy to use as your word processor.

When we work with clients to implement content management on their web site we simply use the existing design and connect it to the content management software.   The software effectively separates your web site’s content from its layout and design so you can take charge of your own content without accidentally making changes to the design.  You effectively become your own website publishing manager.

If you would like to be more independent in managing your web site’s content, keeping it more current and interesting, please contact us for a no obligation conversation about implementation and costs.  Our Fast Start Program guarantees that we help you to take charge of your web site’s content as quickly as possible and for a predetermined fixed price.

What would you do if your offices were flooded and you found your server under three feet of water?  What steps would you take if a power outage shut down your servers for more than a day?  What if your premises were burned to the ground?  How would you recover your data and keep your business running after an unforeseen disaster?  When disasters strike unprepared companies, the consequences range from prolonged system downtime, and the resulting revenue loss, to companies going out of business completely. Of companies that experience a major loss of business data, 43% never reopen; 51% close within two years; and only 6% survive the long-term.  Yet many businesses are not prepared to deal with the unexpected.

The key to surviving such an event is having a business continuity plan (BCP) in place.  In plain language, a BCP is working out how to stay in business in the event of disaster.

Business continuity is sometimes confused with disaster recovery, but they are separate entities.  Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity and is defined as the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of the technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster.

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) should include planning for the resumption of applications, data, hardware, communications (such as networking) and other IT infrastructure.  So, where a BCP includes planning for non-IT related aspects such as key personnel, facilities, crisis communication and reputation protection, it should reference the DRP for IT-related recovery and continuity. This article focuses on disaster recovery planning as it relates to a business’ computer systems.

Disasters can be classified in two broad categories:

Natural Disasters

Preventing a natural disaster is very difficult, but it is possible to take precautions to avoid losses. Such disasters include flood, fire, earthquake, tornado, hurricane, smog, etc.

Man-made Disasters

These disasters are the most common and a major reason for systems failure.  Human error and intervention may be intentional or unintentional, which can cause massive failures such as loss of communication and utility. These disasters include walkout, sabotage, burglary, virus, intrusion, etc.

The following provides a basic overview of the steps required to develop your DRP:

Step 1:  Risk Analysis

The first step in drafting a disaster recovery plan is to conduct a thorough risk analysis of your computer systems.  List all the possible risks that threaten system uptime and evaluate how imminent they are in your particular organization. Anything that can cause a system outage is a threat; from relatively common manmade threats like virus attacks and accidental data deletions, to more rare natural threats like floods and fires.  Determine which of your threats are the most likely to occur and prioritize them using a simple system: rank each threat in two important categories, probability and impact.  In each category, rate the risks as low, medium, or high.

For example, a small manufacturing company located in Woodstock, Ontario could rate a tornado threat as a medium probability and high impact, while the threat of utility failure due to a power outage could rate as a high probability and high impact.  So in this company's risk analysis, a power outage would be a higher risk than a tornado and would therefore be a higher priority in the disaster recovery plan.

Step 2:  Establish the Budget

Once you've figured out your risks, you have to determine what can be done to restrain them and what it would cost.  Can a threat be detected before it hits?  How can the potential of it occurring be reduced?  How can its impact to your business be minimized?  Is the cost to mitigate worth it?

For example, our small manufacturing company could employ an emergency power supply to mitigate its power outage threat and have all its data backed up daily on tapes and stored at a remote site in case of a tornado. The more preventative measures you establish upfront the better. “Dollars spent on prevention are worth more than dollars spent on recovery.”

The results of Step 1 should be a comprehensive list of possible threats, each with its corresponding solution and cost.  It is imperative that those responsible for systems management present all of these threats to upper management so they can make an informed decision regarding the potential size of the disaster recovery budget (i.e., which risks the company can afford to tolerate and which it must pay to mitigate).  Unfortunately, systems management often fails to communicate the real risks for system downtime to upper management.  Although it's okay for management to say no; it's not okay for the technical people not to let them know of all of the risks.

A good place to begin is by determining the cost of downtime to the business. How long can your business afford to be without its computer systems should one of these threats occur?

Ultimately, management has to decide which threats the business can tolerate and what kind of budget is reasonable for the business to support.  However, when first developing the DRP, systems support personnel are "shooting in the dark” without knowing what kind of budget is available, so both IT and management must agree early on in the process which data and applications are most critical to the operation of the business and need to be recovered most quickly in a disaster.

The management of our small manufacturer may, for example, decide that they can only afford a budget for the emergency generators and the company will have to assume the risk of an earthquake.

Disaster recovery budgets vary from company to company but they typically run between two and eight percent of the overall IT budget.  Companies for which system availability is critical are usually on the higher end of the scale, while companies that can function without it are on the lower end.  However, these percentages may be too small.  It’s not uncommon for very large companies to spend as much as 15 percent on disaster recovery.

Step 3:  Develop the Plan

Feedback from management will begin to shape the DRP procedures.  If, for example, they determine that the company must be up within 48 hours of an incident to stay viable, then the amount of time it would take to execute the recovery plan and have the business back up and running can be calculated based on this time frame.  It is highly recommended that the recovery systems are tested, configured and retested 24 hours prior to launching them.  The recovery procedure should be written in a detailed plan or "script."

The script will also outline priorities for the recovery: What needs to be recovered first?  What is the communication procedure for the initial respondents? To complement the script, a checklist or test procedure should be created to verify that everything is back to normal once repairs and data recovery have taken place.

Step 4:  Test, Test, Test

Once your DRP is set, test it frequently.  Eventually you'll need to perform a component-level restoration of your largest databases to get a realistic assessment of your recovery procedure, but a periodic walk-through of the procedure with the Recovery Team will assure that everyone knows their roles.  Test the systems you're going to use in recovery regularly to validate that all the pieces work.  Always record your test results and update the DRP to address any shortcomings.

As your business environment changes, so should your DRP.  Reexamine the plan every year on a high level: Do you still need every part of the plan?  Do you need to add to it?  Will the budget need to be adjusted to accommodate changes to the plan?  As applications, hardware, and software are added to your network, they must be brought into the plan.  New employees must be trained on recovery procedures.  New threats to business seem to pop up every week and a sound DRP takes all of them into account.

There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution when it comes to creating a disaster recovery plan but I hope the information in this article has given you pause to consider steps you may want to take to ensure that your business survives in the event of disaster. 

If you would like to know more about how we can help you with your disaster recovery planning, please contact us to arrange a free initial discovery meeting.

Richard (Rich) Mayo joined us in 2003 as a Business Technology Advisor, specializing in accounting software support.  Rich quickly became a tremendously valuable addition to our team and as any client who has worked with him knows, he is extremely personable, intelligent and creative.

Rich grew up in the Lorne Park area of Mississauga and was involved in a range of activities from athletics to art and drama.  He was even in a musical, performing the role of ‘Big Jule’ in his high school’s production of ‘Guys and Dolls’.

After high school Rich spent a year working and traveling through Europe before enrolling at the University of Waterloo where he majored in English Literature and minored in Classical and Medieval History, and Philosophy.  Rich jokes that he can read and write in more dead languages (Greek, Latin and Old English) than modern ones.  After getting his degree he made an interesting decision and took a business course before opening his own business in 1996 in Woodstock, Ontario; a martial arts school.

The opening of his school wasn’t really much of a departure for Rich as he had devoted much of his time to martial arts after leaving high school.  Over the course of several years Rich attained black belt rankings in a number of eastern disciplines, including Goju-ryu Karate, Kobudo, and Tai-Chi.  While running his school, Rich trained four of his students to the rank of black belt.  He married one of those students, Joanne, in 2007.

“I love learning new things and meeting new people.  Working at P.C. Consulting allows me to experience a slice-of-life from many different clients’ viewpoints,” says Rich.

Joanne and Rich live in Woodstock with their two cats, Riley and Weezer.  In their free time they like going for walks and creating board and card games.