Red Panda Systems Newsletter – November 2021
Our Thanks for Another Great Year
We would like to thank all of our clients for allowing us to obtain a successful trajectory together over these past 8 years as a business. We are grateful for the strong partnership we have with each and every one of you. It drives our growth and allows us to know each one of you well, so that we can work in concert to understand your unique needs and provide more personalized services and solutions that are relevant for your business and your success.
We would also like to thank our families, loved ones, friends, partners, and furry pets for their support, which enabled us to work diligently for our clients, for very long hours sometimes, but mostly to provide by doing what we love to do – help others and gain a greater knowledge each day on how to better serve our customers.
As we continue to grow, we remain committed to continuous improvement within both ourselves and our company. We have begun a transformation to provide an enhanced support experience that begins with an upgrade to ConnectWise. This will bring a superior ticketing process allowing us to be more proactive in helping clients, make communication more seamless, and will provide a more informed process to help clients with IT expenses. We have implemented a new vCIO process that will allow us to provide our customers with better business intelligence, better budgeting, and a strategic plan for information technology and services. We believe that quality CIO consultation is key to your success and we’re excited that we can bring this service to you.
In the coming year, we’re looking forward to providing more training with enhanced tools, on-site trainings, and a Client Success portal that will make communicating with our partners a superior experience. We look forward to meeting 2022’s challenges with you, and wish you Happy Holidays!
The Red Panda Team
Why You Need a Business Continuity Plan Now
How are you preparing your IT as business ramps up again? Do you have a plan in place for business continuity? With the sudden and required changes to how companies were allowed to and could safely operate when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we’ve all seen how things can change in an instant. A global health crisis isn’t the only precipitating factor for change, though, so now – before the need to implement one again – is the time to create a plan.
Businesses benefit when there is a business continuity plan in place that assists during changes in the workplace, emergencies, and critical outages. Included should be precise instructions and procedures that are thoroughly flushed out and documented. Once recorded, they are kept in a safe and secure location known to a designated person (or persons) who will take the lead in their implementation. To keep the company up and running during whatever eventuality necessitated executing the plan, all necessary departments must operate efficiently during the unforeseen, unusual, or potentially harmful event. All responsible parties should not only have a say, but there should be a consensus among the president, CEO, and other principal leaders.
Many organizations make the critical error of believing their scheduled IT backups will get them through such a situation. Unfortunately, backups existing is not the same thing as being able to access the data, documents, and more, and what good does it do to have your information if you can’t get to it and do what you need to do with it? While backups are still vital, the idea of relying on them – when it comes to a business continuity plan – must consider that retrieving and using all that has been saved might not be an option at your primary location of operations.
Once a business continuity plan is in place, the company will be in a much better position before, during, and after any potential disaster. Following the continuity phase, a solid disaster recovery plan will likely be needed, so it’s wise to create that now as well. While the continuity plan focuses on “keeping the doors open” and day-to-day operations along with critical business functions proceeding, the disaster recovery plan concentrates on “healing” all aspects of the business. For example, for Red Panda Systems’ clients, we would help you work toward restoring hardware, applications, data, documents, information, the highest level of IT security, and networks.
Keeping your business running during a crisis is important, and recovering from the tumultuous time holds equal weight. The disaster recovery plan should include how your company will recuperate from losses, outages, and downtime, in addition to how to return to full business operations.