Archived CEO Blogs

In my last post, I shared some sobering numbers from a recent study by the DRP Council on how well – and not well – organizations recover from disruptions. Many of the problems revealed in the study can, I believe, be attributed to four causes:

Inadequate recovery plans that don’t anticipate the types of events that actually occur
Insufficient plan documentation and lack of compliance reporting
Not nearly enough recovery plan testing
Failing the recovery tests that do occur

All of this is eminently understandable – it’s hard to focus budget and time on what we prefer to regard as unlikely possibilities.

So here’s my first recovery best practice: think of your recovery plan as the best way to keep those possibilities unlikely, because when they do happen, they cost plenty.

Online presence has never been more important to your business – but behind it lurks immense technical complexity. The sort of complexity that produces things like software, network and power failures, and human error.

So, of course, it’s prudent to prepare ways to recover from such failures, mistakes and vagaries of nature, which is why so many organizations – a majority, according to a recent study by the DRP Council – deploy some sort of secondary recovery site. Though, less than 10% use cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) .

We can’t afford to ignore the myriad of mobile devices and apps currently saturating our attention and wireless connections.

In my last post, I laid out some of the industry’s eye-popping numbers. This time, I’m offering up just one graphic (from Cisco’s recent Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update ) showing why you must upgrade your network infrastructure. Pronto.

Wireless chatter really is everywhere: I recently saw an ad from a major pain relief company touting the benefits of its latest product, a “wireless” pain patch

But wireless implementations can be plenty painful, and there’s no magic patch to ease the strain.

When clients ask us the best way to ensure that a wireless service performs as desired, we advise them to begin by asking — in non-technical terms — what they’re trying to accomplish.

In many companies, the wireless capability added on to their enterprise network a few years ago has become some employees’ primary network.

It’s a development that signals just how quickly mobile devices are proliferating the workplace. The so-called “consumerization of business” changes the way we work — and our data networks have to keep up.

This transformation has been in the works for a while. In 2011, market analyst firm Gartner predicted 80% of corporate wireless network technologies would be obsolete by 2015. Gartner may well be right, given the findings of more recent research.

When it comes to choosing a firm to help with your IT staffing efforts, it’s important to remember that some IT staffing firms do a better job than others. Here’s what you have a right to expect:

1. An IT staffing company should be able to help you strategically plan your IT hiring
This involves a thorough examination of budget priorities, workloads, the skillsets of current team members, and future projects — all with an eye on flexibly meeting both your short- and long-term goals. Look for an IT staffing company that helps you determine what types of special skills you need for your IT projects, the best mix of permanent IT staff and contractors, when you’ll see workload spikes, etc.