From tornadoes and floods to security breaches and employee error, unexpected catastrophes can befall any type of business. While you may not be able to prevent or even anticipate disaster, you can be well-prepared before it strikes in order to minimize the impact and downtime. The importance of testing your plans for disaster recovery and business continuity can’t be understated.

According to a recent study, 48 percent of small businesses lack a business continuity plan—even though they are most at risk of going under when disaster strikes. While unexpected crises can happen at any moment, their impact can be minimized and mitigated through careful planning.

Managed services providers (MSPs) offer 24/7 support for your entire IT infrastructure: software, hardware, and configurations. These services are remotely monitored and managed in order to keep a pulse on your IT environment at all times.

From Hurricane Irene in 2011 to the “blizzard of 2013” that dumped two feet of snow across much of the state, Connecticut has seen its fair share of extreme weather. Not only do these natural disasters disrupt people’s daily lives and prevent them from coming into work, they also disable or damage critical business infrastructure and utilities such as power, electricity, and heating.

With news of another cyber attack in the headlines every other week, it’s hardly surprising that businesses of all sizes and industries are growing more and more concerned. 68 percent of organizations believe that they are “very vulnerable” or “extremely vulnerable” to a data breach.

What Are Managed Services? Managed services are the IT operations, functions, and processes that an organization chooses to outsource to a third-party external managed services provider (MSP). The organization signs a contract with the MSP known as the service level agreement (SLA) that outlines the MSP’s roles and responsibilities when monitoring and managing your IT services.

Last month, Kelser was thrilled to be invited back to the 94.9 FM CBS Radio airwaves for another episode of Real Estate Radio (listen to the first appearance here). I actually love this radio show. It seems so random—a full hour about real estate—but the hosts Byron Lazine and Pat Kenny use real estate as a jumping off point to talk about a wide range of topics that affect quality of life and where people choose to live. This time around they focused on hot topics in the tech world including Facebook privacy and the GDPR, ransomware, and phishing following high-profile cyber attacks in Connecticut.

There's no way around certain disastrous scenarios in terms of IT. With computer systems, the question of operational mismanagement or dissolution shouldn't be "if", it should be "when". When will systems collapse? And perhaps, how?