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.

The post IT Glue DR Runbook: Maximize Recovery Efficiency Following a Disaster appeared first on IT Glue.

Disasters Impact Everything

Disasters affect every aspect of your business, and present significant challenges to business continuity. First, you have to prepare for the complete destruction of your premises. How long would it take to get your team back and running if that happened? Are they equipped to work remotely? Do you rely on physical backup, or is there a SaaS backup failover as well? If you could get your team working quickly again, would they have access to the information that they need?

Prepare to Help Your Clients

If your clients are also affected, how prepared are you to help? This may be a matter of assessing your ability to visit client sites and work with them to restore key data and systems. You might have to set up entire clients on remote work at a moment’s notice—and you might have to do this at the same time you’re facing the impact of the same disaster.

Managing the Financial Impact

Then there’s the financial impact of a disaster. If your clients can’t pay—and let’s face it, money isn’t the biggest thing for anybody to worry about in the aftermath of disaster—you need to find ways to make that work. Work with vendors who are willing to help you, because that’s going to put you in a better position to help your customers and community. But also have a disaster fund, even if to bridge the gap until an insurance payout arrives.

To fail to plan is to plan to fail. The odds of a Godzilla attack are admittedly quite low, but fires, floods and other natural disasters are all pretty common scenarios any business could face, and should have a plan for. It’s the only way to ensure that you don’t lose everything when disaster strikes.

To learn more about business continuity planning, we’ve put together an in-depth e-book on the topic. Download it now to get started.

Download the e-book here

The post Disaster Planning for MSPs appeared first on IT Glue.

Get mobile!

When disaster strikes, you want to be able to access information wherever you are, without having to rely on a physical space like your office. Doing so not only ensures that you have all the information you need at your fingertips, but that you can use that information to help your clients just as easily as if you were in the office.

The IT Glue mobile app allows you to manage all of your passwords and configurations with the same high-tech security as the desktop version. This way, in the event of an emergency all the information you need is available at your fingertips, regardless of the effects of the disaster. Not only does this offer you greater flexibility, but it gives you the confidence that your data is safe despite the potential severity of the circumstances at hand. We’re adding new asset types to mobile soon, with a mission to get all asset types onto the mobile app in the next few months.

To take advantage of our mobile app, you can download it here.

Cloud storage

We know there’s a significant debate between cloud and on-premises storage, but when it comes to getting your MSP up and running as fast as possible after a disaster, you’re going to want that information stored in the cloud. The reality is that if your data remains in on-premises storage, you run the risk of losing that information if your site is damaged. On the other hand, when your information is stored in the cloud, it doesn’t depend on the state of your premises to still be there. When it comes to protecting your information from a disaster, taking advantage of the cloud at least to some extent is a no-brainer.

Integrations

You never know what information you could lose, so it’s better that you try to keep all of that information documented and connected. By integrating your RMM, PSA, and BDR platforms with IT Glue, you increase the chances of knowing that you’ll still have access to all of that information, whenever you need it. You can check out a full list of the integrations we offer here.

Give your clients the same opportunity

After a disaster, getting your MSP up and running is crucial, but so is ensuring you can do the same for your clients. That’s where MyGlue comes in. MyGlue allows you to give your client the same sense of security and flexibility that IT Glue provides you. Even more, it means that in the event of a disaster, you’ve already provided your clients with a platform that will help them get up to speed, without relying on you to do it for them.

When your clients are taking advantage of MyGlue, they themselves can create and store all passwords and documentation in the platform. Moreover, you can share with them important credentials as well. You can even go to the lengths of creating an SOP that details what to do in the event of an emergency. Your client can then access this whenever needed, including on the MyGlue mobile app.

And the passwords, well I think we can agree that in a disaster any sticky notes will be destroyed, but the passwords stored in MyGlue will be immediately accessible.

If you’re interested in learning more about how IT Glue secures your information and enhances your efficiency, sign up for a demo!

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IT Glue is an award-winning documentation platform that allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation you need to help your MSP run better. By integrating PSA and RMM data, we can help increase your efficiency, and reduce onboarding times by even more. By eliminating wasted time from your business, IT Glue gives you more time to focus on what matters – growing your business.

The post How to Ensure Your Documentation is Disaster Ready appeared first on IT Glue.