You work hard to provide impeccable service to your clients, manage their assets and keep your business operations running smoothly. Unfortunately, disaster may strike at any time. A critical part of IT success is to stay prepared to overcome these emergencies, so you can keep your clients’ networks and assets protected with minimal downtime.

Every single minute following a disaster is crucial. You must be able to manage your time well and be as efficient as possible to bring everything back up to speed. If you fail to do that, it could jeopardize your reputation as well as your revenue.

So, how can you ensure you are fully equipped to quickly recover following a disaster? The new IT Glue DR Runbook, through the Unitrends integration, is meant just for that. It enables you to export an automated standardized list of protected machines with their latest information, drastically improving your asset recovery time.

Comprehensive backup visibility

To leverage the DR Runbook, you must first enable the Unitrends integration in IT Glue. This allows you to bring in all your protected assets from Unitrends into IT Glue so you can easily see their backup health without switching solutions and wasting valuable time.

This integration shows you the Unitrends backup status, last backup time and storage for endpoints in IT Glue. Additionally, with the Unitrends Backup Coverage Report, you can produce an automated PDF report to show the current backup state of any internal or client networks. This helps you identify risks or opportunities to create more revenue.

Based on the Backup Coverage Report results, you can determine how vulnerable a network may be if a disaster were to happen and prepare accordingly.

DR Runbook

With the new IT Glue DR Runbook, you can export an automated runbook that outlines all the Unitrends protected assets after a disaster. This helps you begin the recovery process instantaneously and minimize downtime. With the exported DR runbook from IT Glue, you can then specify the boot order in which you want your machines to be recovered, so that you can ensure the most effective recovery for each function/department.

Once it is completed, you can send the IT Glue DR Runbook to the Unitrends DR-as-a-Service team to be used to kick off failover and recovery based on your boot order. If you do not use the DRaaS team, you may still utilize the DR Runbook for recovering impacted machines on your own.

The DR Runbook will include the most up-to-date device data to help you get the necessary information for recovery. This is a significant time saver. Normally, maintaining a list of all your machines and then identifying which were affected after a disaster is all done manually on a spreadsheet. However, with the Unitrends integration and the IT Glue DR Runbook, you can bypass a lot of administrative work to keep track of your assets, especially during times when you should simply focus on ensuring your IT environment is fully operational.

The automated DR Runbook ensures no machines are missed, left with errors or rebooted incorrectly. You can have peace of mind knowing that the DR Runbook will provide you with every single impacted machine and the necessary details to address potential issues.

Learn more about this feature in our Knowledge Base article.

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If you are an IT professional, you are most likely managing dozens of assets that need protection, and your large tool stack is only complicating things further. This can change with our new Datto Continuity integration, which can bring in your backup information where the rest of your documentation resides for maximum efficiency and asset protection. 

By consolidating all of your assets alongside device backup information in one place, you can easily ensure your clients’ networks are never at risk. With the Datto Continuity integration, all backups will be synced to IT Glue so that you can easily review crucial backup information, determine the integrity of a network’s protection status, and quickly identify out-of-compliance issues and rectify them as needed. 

Consolidate all your assets and backup information

IT Glue is trusted by over 13,000 IT professionals as their single source of truth for all information in the IT environments they manage. With the growing number of IT Glue integration, you can have a consolidated view of your IT environment by bringing in important information from your tech stack including PSA, RMM, network monitoring, Microsoft and now Datto Continuity. 

Backup is not a tool technicians access every day. By pulling the information into IT Glue, which is accessed daily, technicians will have more visibility. 

The Datto Continuity information enriches your existing IT Glue configurations by bringing you fields you are already familiar with in Datto. 

Complete backup details in one pane

With this integration, you can see all the details about your backups directly in IT Glue, including the Datto SIRIS appliance and the protected assets. 

Datto SIRIS appliance: 

Automatically document Datto SIRIS appliance as IT Glue Configuration that will include details such as used storage (local), available storage (local), cloud storage used and last check-in time. 

Protected assets: 

You will get a single view for last backup time and last backup status. Additionally, you can easily determine whether the backup was successful, the latest recovery point for the backup and whether to use onsite or Datto’s cloud. This will help you quickly determine whether the configuration is protected. 

The following fields from Datto will be visible in IT Glue as Device Details as per the latest backup: protected volumes count, unprotected volumes count, protected names and unprotected names. 

Validate backup status and ensure integrity

Your clients are trusting you to ensure the continuity of their businesses, and you must aim to deliver on that promise. At a quick glance, validate the integrity of the protected configuration with a screenshot and the time stamp to ensure the backup is bootable. 

• You can see the integrity of your last backup by verifying when a successful screenshot was taken. You can provide a historical backup integrity summary information about the last 10 backups.  
• You can also quickly determine whether a client and their assets are protected with a single view for last backup time, last backup status, whether the backup was successful and the latest recovery point that you have offsite in Datto’s cloud. 
• Datto data volume updates will show up in IT Glue as well. This enables you to check whether volumes are protected, whether anyone added a new volume and whether a backup was set up. 

To learn more about the Datto Continuity integration, check out the Knowledge Base article.

I want a Demo!

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Considering the significance of business continuity, it is important to understand various aspects of business continuity planning and make it a part of your business operations. In this blog, we’ll explore everything business continuity entails and understand how it plays a critical role in developing a resilient business structure.

What is the meaning of business continuity?

In simple terms, business continuity focuses on creating a plan to deal with unexpected disruptions that take place in the business world. Although risk mitigation plays a major role in the functioning of all major business organizations, what happens when disaster strikes unannounced? This is where business continuity comes in.

It provides a roadmap to ensure that the essential functions of an organization are up and running quickly even after the occurrence of a disaster. With proper planning, you can keep mission-critical functions running throughout the organization and keep operational downtime to a bare minimum.

How do you ensure business continuity?

When thinking of hindrances to business continuity, we always think of major disasters like fire or cyberattacks. However, that isn’t always the case. The issue could be as simple as an employee leaving the organization with key information stored only in his memory. In such cases, you can ensure business continuity with well-documented processes.

To prepare for every scenario possible, you need to create a plan that addresses all aspects of business disruption. However, it doesn’t just end there. You need to constantly and consistently test and update the plan to ensure its effectiveness. In short, you need a business continuity management framework that acts as the foundation for all your business continuity efforts.

What is business continuity planning (BCP)?

A business continuity plan is a written document that provides an outline of how a business organization will continue to operate in the event of an unexpected disaster. These disasters could be anything including fire, flood, disease outbreaks, cyberattacks, etc. A BCP is the most integral part of ensuring business continuity since it identifies all potential threats and provides viable solutions.

Why do you need a business continuity plan?

Planning plays a critical role in any disaster prevention or risk management strategy. A BCP does exactly that and more. It provides an outline of what is necessary and how to react during a business disruption. Without a BCP, you won’t have a clear idea of what action needs to be taken when faced with a disaster. In essence, it is a written record of agreed-upon practices that should be adhered to.

Even when there are no key decision-makers around during times like the holiday season, a BCP can be used as a guide to follow standard business continuity practices.

What are the objectives of business continuity planning?

The main objective of business continuity planning is to recognize the potential threats to a business and come up with measures to counter them. Some of the key objectives of a business continuity plan are as follows:

• Prevent or minimize financial loss to an organization
• Serve customers even during an unexpected disruption
• Create contingency plans to mitigate the effects of various disruptions
• Identify key resources who can perform recovery operations
• Find weaknesses in solutions and come up with alternate solutions

What should a business continuity plan include?

Designing a business continuity plan is not a rigid process. It may differ from one organization to another. However, there are certain elements that could be applicable to all organizations. Here’s a list of common elements that should be included in a business continuity plan:

• All mission-critical functions and their complete analysis
• Data backup and recovery components
• An analysis of all IT functions within an organization
• A list of all major threats to a business
• A list of strategies and countermeasures against these threats
• Proof for all the tested strategies

You can also think of other key elements specific to your business while designing your plan.

When should a business continuity plan be updated and maintained?

A business continuity plan is not something you create once and then forget about. It is a critical part of your business, and you must periodically review and update it. You can update a plan when you come across new threats or solutions to existing threats. In fact, you must include anything that can provide you existing plan. Regular maintenance and review are essential if you want to be prepared for all kinds of threats to business continuity

Check out our Quick Start to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery webinar.

What is business continuity testing?

For a business continuity plan to work successfully, you need to maintain certain quality standards. This helps ensure that your systems are running smoothly without any issues. Business continuity testing plays a key role in maintaining these quality standards. To put it simply, it gives you an idea of how prepared you are to deal with an unexpected disaster.

How do you test a business continuity plan?

Here are some proven ways to test your business continuity plan:

• Review the plan: Your testing process starts with a simple review of your existing plan. When reviewing the plan, you need to gather inputs from various departments and stakeholders. In addition to managers and business leaders, you need to include other individual stakeholders in the review process.
• Determine the duration: Your employees will often be too busy to take part in a testing process. That’s why you need to set aside some time for them to take part in it. Determine how long it should last so all involved stakeholders can prepare ahead and allocate time in their schedule.
• Create a scenario: You need to create a fake scenario of a disaster that affects your business. Your employees should perform their roles correctly during such scenarios. You need to monitor their activities and make sure everything is under control.
• Evaluate the results: Once the simulation is over, you need to evaluate the results of the test. This helps you identify areas of improvement and make modifications to the existing plan.

How often should business continuity plans be tested?

Testing should be a continuous process. The business continuity system is cyclical and relies on proper performance review and tweaking to run efficiently. But what if you don’t experience a disruption? How often should you stage a disruption to see how you perform? The answer lies in business continuity management.

What is business continuity management (BCM)?

Business continuity management refers to a framework that identifies the potential risk of exposure to various threats and the solutions you can incorporate. It measures an organization’s resilience against various threats and how the interests of various stakeholders can be safeguarded. It is a comprehensive framework that includes both the planning stage and the testing stage.

Why is business continuity management important?

Business continuity management begins with the development of policies and procedures that ensure business continuity. This framework helps an organization identify whether it has strictly adhered to all the procedures outlined in the document.

Under this framework, you recognize the need for business continuity management first, then proceed to assess threats at the internal and external level, followed by designing and implementing a comprehensive business continuity plan before finally testing and analyzing the effectiveness of the said plan and new or recurring threats.

This is a cyclical process that has responsibilities for stakeholders at each step. The framework also helps businesses ensure that each member is performing what is expected for business resilience.

Who is responsible for business continuity management?

The responsibility falls on the entire organization without a doubt. Each member has a role to perform when it comes to ensuring business continuity after a disaster. Your employees need to be aware of the potential threats and they must know how to act in case of an unexpected disruption. Considering the level of responsibility associated with everyone, having a well-documented system in place is of critical importance.

Business continuity documentation with IT Glue

IT Glue is one of the top players in the industry when it comes to business continuity documentation. With our powerful platform, you can document all aspects of business continuity including security policies, guidelines, procedures, system information and more. By keeping your documentation up to date and sharing it with your team members through IT Glue, you can ensure instant access when in need of business continuity.

IT Glue’s SOC 2-compliant documentation platform features an immutable audit trail, multifactor authentication and next-generation password management engine. These features are fully integrated and linked with all your documentation.

To learn more about how IT Glue can help you with business continuity, request a demo.

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First off, attitude in the context of your business refers to collective attitude. As the leader, it also refers to your individual attitude. If times get tough and you start running around like a chicken with its head cut off, you’re done. If you as leader are willing to calmly fight your way through whatever challenges arise, then your team will draw inspiration from that. If you’re the owner, I presume the skin you have in the game is all the motivation you need, but this goes for leadership at all levels.

Collective attitude is something you build into your culture. And a resilient attitude is a combination of determination and resourcefulness. That attitude of “it’s not over until we win” not only points you in the right direction, but it permits you to do whatever you need to win. Tap into collective creativity. If something isn’t working, be prepared to pivot. Be brutally honest – not brutal, but brutally honest about your strategies and tactics.

Think about the coronavirus situation. You probably came into this with an entire way of doing business that worked. Then, just like that, the old rules get thrown out the window. If you’re going to insist on doing the same things during and post-corona that worked before, you are doing your company and yourself a disservice. You have to be willing to let go of old habits and patterns that no longer serve you.

At IT Glue, a lot of good stuff is baked into how we do business, but we’ve had to make a few significant changes to our approach because of the current situation. That’s resilience – keep what works, discard what doesn’t, and always be prepared to fight, every single day.

If you’re good at what you do, and the vast majority of you are, then attitude is going to be one of the most important factors determining whether you fail, survive, or thrive in 2020 and beyond.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to see why over 150,000 users love IT Glue, request a demo! Our award-winning platform is the most widely used and has a wealth of game-changing features, not to mention the highest number of integrations.

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Hiring & Firing

Obviously you want to hire the best people, but attracting the best is easier said than done. If you’re really good at sales, you don’t sell low value items on salary; you sell luxury real estate, investments or something else that makes you fat stacks. The same principle applies in every business – people who know their worth make a point to work in the company that gets them the most. The most money, the best work environment, all the things. Your HR strategy has to include building the environment that works for your hiring needs. Attracting the best candidates requires some quality marketing as well, but you need to have something to market in order to get a commitment. As for firing, just remember the old adage that it’s not who you hire that hurts your business, it’s who you don’t fire.

Training & Retention

An HR function that can be quite powerful is defining the roles in each organization, and what training is required to ensure that the people in those roles have the tools they need to be their best. Be aware that many roles change over time, so defining roles is a continuous process. Retaining employees usually starts with making sure that their roles, workdays and compensation are all aligned – and aligned with the employee’s own sense of personal worth. There’s a balancing act in there that can be difficult to master, so don’t take retention lightly.

Work from Home

May as well just say it, business resilience does mean having flexibility in working arrangements. If your employees need to avoid the office for whatever reason, then you need a specific plan to make that transition smooth. What used to be a “nice to have” perk has become a business essential, so take work from home out of your business continuity plan and put it straight into your HR operating plan.

Talent Pipeline

Investing in your talent is key to retention. You need to have people ready to step up in the event of a key departure. That means training, and building, and yes, counting on the fact that a few of them won’t want to improve and a few others will take their skills elsewhere. Turnover is part of business, so the key isn’t to avoid turnover by not investing in your workforce; the key is making sure turnover doesn’t hurt your business. There’s also technology that can help you build resilience against turnover. We’ve heard IT Glue’s documentation software, which helps you turn individual knowledge into company knowledge.

If people are truly the most important thing in your business, and they probably are, then HR functions have to be treated with equivalent importance. There’s a reason the world is shifting from the old school “HR as a line item” mentality to one governed by the principles of strategic HR management.

If you’re curious about how documentation helps you build turnover resilience, we should talk more. Start with our demo video, and we can go from there.

Why yes, I do want to be more efficient

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Heir to the Throne?

A lot of businesses pass down the line from the founder to the children. There’s a certain logic here – the children can be groomed from the beginning to run the business. That makes the training process easy but it also brings with it some challenges. The kids might not actually be interested in taking over. Or, handing the keys to your kids might be a really terrible idea, and the grandkids might be better, if it so happens that talent skips a generation. But there’s another risk to keeping it in the family: it’s tough to retain quality employees when they think they have no chance at the top job. Choose your successors wisely, and don’t think they have to be from the family.

Overstuff Your Pipeline

You can never have too much talent. If your MSP is of a decent size, and has a deep bench, then you’re a bit more insulated against any departures or defections of key people that might happen along the way. The reality is that people leave, and some of those people are the ones you pegged for bigger things. Have more than one potential successor, at least until you get down to the last year and can start grooming the next leader directly.

Teach Leadership

Your next CEO isn’t just going to magically appear; you’ll need to train your next CEO. In a big corporation, this is easy and just a natural part of doing business. But in a smaller company, you can forgo a formal leadership training program and use a combination of external training courses and direct mentorship. Whichever option works best for your situation, just make sure that you’re making the people on your team better. Because if all of a sudden you can’t work, and the whole place goes down the gurgler without you, that’s on you. If you can go on vacation for a couple of weeks and it’s no big deal, that’s when you know you’ve done your job as a leader in training future leaders.

Business Continuity

If your business depends on you for its survival, there’s the obvious disaster scenario where something happens and you can’t work anymore. Great training, a leadership pipeline and documentation can help offset some of that risk. But the continuity aspect also takes into consideration the idea that one day you might want to retire. If you’re ten years out from retirement, or more, maybe this isn’t the biggest issue, but get into that last five years and you’ll at least want to start work on the succession plan. That’s also a good point to start thinking about how you’ve built your business into something you can sell – that equity is probably a big part of your retirement fund. Your succession plan might just be selling out and walking away, so take that into consideration as well.

Since I do happen to be in marketing, I’d be negligent if I failed to mention that having as much valuable information documented as possible will help smooth any leadership transition. Leave the new leader with as much of your knowledge as possible for best results, and something IT Glue better than anybody else. Give us a few minutes and we’ll show you how we can help.

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Have Multiple Playbooks

Have a handful of different playbooks. The way you handle a ransomware attack will be quite different from how you handle a Godzilla attack, so multiple playbooks are necessary. A good playbook is all you need – it doesn’t need to be perfect. In fact, it won’t be, because no disaster is 100% predictable in terms of its impact. So focus on having the rough skeleton. Put all the key issues on the table – making payroll, getting the core parts of the business back and running, how to serve your clients, how to handle revenue disruptions.

Review Your Playbooks Regularly

Playbooks need to be revisited and revised on a regular cadence, too. Imagine last month if you’d looked up your pandemic playbook… only to realize that when you wrote it you were a quarter of the size, with only one location, and SaaS didn’t exist. If the playbook is not relevant to your business at the time of the disaster, it’s useless.

Dry Runs to Help Identify Areas for Improvement

Reviewing playbooks and doing dry runs, is also a way to identify issues ahead of time that you otherwise might not have thought of. A dumb example would be “use rainy day fund to meet payroll”, only to realize that your rainy day fund only has $1000 in it, because that’s what payroll was when you set the fund up in 1996. The plan may not be perfect, but it should be good enough to provide you with guidance and stability when you’re in a moment of crisis. Better to identify issues ahead of time.

Establish a Cadence for your Dry Runs

It is recommended that you conduct dry runs on a single scenario, but that you do three or four of them a year with your leadership group. Multiple copies of the playbooks should be available – lots of redundancy and failover is good here. Disaster planning should become part of your culture, because otherwise you simply won’t be ready when disaster hits. In that scenario, you’ll probably default to what you know, but what you know is built for business as usual, not business unusual.

Make Sure Your Playbook is Accessible

Disaster playbooks can’t live in a file cabinet collecting dust. Rather, they need to be where you can access them when you need them. Print multiple copies, of course, but also keep it on the cloud, stored in IT Glue. Set permissions on a need to know basis. Link the document to your key passwords, and to the checklists that your leadership group will use to get things back up and running quickly. We also recommend working with your clients on their continuity plans, where their IT needs are concerned. Share these between each other using MyGlue. If disaster strikes a client and you have a checklist of their top IT restoration priorities, you can get started right away.

Take Stock of What Really Matters

The current situation is an opportunity to rethink priorities, take stock of what’s important, but also to work towards becoming better. There’s no time like now to start evaluating your disaster preparedness and see how you can improve going forward.

To help with your business continuity planning, we’ve created an e-book that highlights some of the major issues and provides you with guidance. We invite you to download this e-book at your leisure.

Download the e-book here

The post Business Continuity Planning for MSPs: Playbooks and Dry Runs appeared first on IT Glue.

What is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is all about making sure your business survives even the most unusual of times. Catastrophic events can and do occur, and the more prepared you are to deal with them, the more likely your business will come out the other side intact.

Failing To Plan Is Planning To Fail

In that sense, business continuity really just centers on making sure that your critical resources—your people, your cash flow and your information—remain intact because without those three things, you won’t have a business.

Sudden, Catastrophic Events

The first part of business continuity planning is to know what events you need to plan for. Just because an event is sudden and catastrophic doesn’t mean it’s unpredictable. If you live in Florida, you kind of know you need a hurricane plan, right? I mean, if a hurricane hits Minnesota maybe that would be a bit of a curveball, but in general you can write out a list pretty quickly of the disasters most likely to affect your business.

Start with natural disasters, floods, fires, ransomware or other technical disasters, loss of a key person, and of course pandemics.

Evaluate Each Potential Catastrophic Event

Each catastrophe is a bit different, and your business continuity planning should take that into account. Understand the similarities between different events, and their differences. For example, if your office burns down or there is a viral outbreak, either way your team will be working from home. But most everything else about those scenarios will be quite different, because your physical premises still exists under one scenario and no longer exists in the other.

What Are Your Core Functions?

Business continuity planning deals with business unusual, rather than business as usual. You want to minimize disruption, of course, but by definition a catastrophic event is disruptive. So it’s best to know what the most important aspects of your business are. For an MSP it’s the functions that directly support what your clients need—serve clients, get paid, business continues.

For all other functions, you can evaluate on a scenario basis. If an earthquake hits your town, you might not need salespeople because you have nobody to sell to. In a viral outbreak, you might need more salespeople because everybody is looking to secure remote work locations. These non-core functions exist for a reason, but catastrophe tends to shift priorities and that’s where you have to understand each scenario and its impact on your operating environment.

Failover and Recovery

Now that you have a sense of what your core functions are that must continue no matter what, develop strategies to make it happen. Mitigating the damage you face from catastrophe, and getting back up to speed as quickly as possible, is often key to surviving a catastrophic event.

Next Steps

As we continue our discussion about business continuity, we’ll talk about how to plan for these events, preventative measures, succession planning and the essential tools of business continuity management (playbooks, checklists, and dry runs). So keep checking back for more insight to help you navigate business unusual.

To jump start your business continuity planning, we invite you to download our comprehensive e-book on Business Continuity Planning.

Download the e-book here

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