IT disasters cost American businesses $1.2 trillion every year. Manufacturing companies aren’t immune from the requirements of data handling. In fact, manufacturing companies create and store significant amounts of business-critical data. Sales documents, plans and drawings, specifications, materials logs, employee data, payroll data, purchasing orders… All that means they’re not immune from the risks of data loss either.
A major data loss event could seriously affect your manufacturing business. That's why a proper backup and disaster recovery plan should be in place.
So how should manufacturing businesses protect themselves?
1: See It Coming
The very nature of disasters means they’re unpredictable. But it’s possible to predict which are more likely than others. If you live in Tornado Alley, prepare for a tornado. If your business site is in coastal Louisiana, you need a flood and hurricane plan.
But you also need to face the fact that the majority of threats to data aren’t coming from brown-outs and floods, hurricanes and landslides. They’re coming from old, faulty data center hardware, hacking and software malfunctions, and from staff using devices and software inappropriately. If you have a reasonable idea of what disaster is likely to look like, you can prepare your business better.
2: Get Your Data Off-Site
If your factory is flooded, that’s a disaster. If your factory is flooded and your basement data center is rendered inoperable, you’ve lost more than a few racks and some wiring - you’ve lost irreplaceable data on sales patterns, product information and employee data too. If your data center is off-site that’s less likely to happen, and as-a-service IT companies like Stratosphere Networks will be happy to provide you with the IT provision you need backed by Service Level Agreements. That can make a huge difference - ecommerce retailer Shop Direct saw its site availability go from 54% to 99.99% when it moved to managed, as-a-service IT provision. That can happen to your internal business applications too. Remember, if your foremen and production staff can’t access the information they need to work accurately and well, that’s an IT disaster right there.
3: Train Your Staff
As more and more staff get hooked up to company networks, it’s more important than ever to make sure your staff understand how to use and how not to use company infrastructure. This goes to BYOD - if your staff are using company software or accessing the company network with their own devices you might want to look into a preemptive mobile security solution so that you’re protected against the employee who brings a virus to work or lays the company’s data open to hackers. Have your CIO draw up rules and teach them - and make sure everyone understands why they’re important.
4: Dry Runs
Do disaster preparedness practices, like fire drills. Who do you call when the IT system goes down? What do you do if you think the company network has been hacked? Figuring this out will save precious minutes or even hours while employees panic when something goes badly wrong, so make doing the right thing a habit well in advance.
If you're ready to implement abackup and disaster recovery plan for your manufacturing business, contact Stratosphere Networks today at (877) 599-3999
