Make Environment Monitoring Part of Your New Year’s Resolutions

This is the time in every new year when individuals and businesses across the globe make New Year’s resolutions, in hopes of improving over last year. Thankfully a good number of companies are making the implementation of a business continuity plan a top priority to help protect them in the event of a major outage. Given that 30% of outages are caused by environmental issues, they should be making environment monitoring a key part of their business continuity plan.

Downtime resulting from environment issues

The biggest environment culprits when it comes to outages and downtime are:

• Heating/AC failure
• Weather
• Power failure

Not all of these factors can be completely eliminated to help improve uptime, however they certainly can be monitored to help greatly reduce their impact if and when they occur.

Too often businesses think only about their computer network, data backups, and equipment when building a business continuity plan, and don’t consider the above environment factors. Or, focus is placed on creating a disaster recovery plan, rather than a business continuity plan intended to minimize the potential impact of an adverse event. Helping to prevent environment issues from impacting a business can help make sure that plans to work offsite don’t ever have to be put into practice.

Looking forward to 2017, businesses should look back at 2016 and some of the key events that caused major business disruption. Storms, blizzards, power loss, extreme heat, and unexpected water incidents (burst pipes, flooded basements, etc.) were among the leading causes of business disruption last year that weren’t related to hacking or data loss episodes.

Planning to avoid business disruption this year

Some environment issues cannot be avoided. Acts of God are inevitable; the goal with a business continuity plan is to help make sure your business can continue to operate as close to 100% as possible despite those events. Early prevention is often the key difference between minimal impacts and extended downtime events.

Currently, only 51% of companies and organizations have a business continuity plan in place. This leaves 49% of businesses without a comprehensive plan to ensure uptime, and prevent potentially catastrophic revenue losses in the event of downtime.

If your business has been operating without a plan, now is the time to put one into place. If your company does have one that doesn’t include environment monitoring, make it one of your business’s primary New Year’s resolutions to add that critical component.

Many MSPs that currently work with businesses to help them protect their network and safeguard their data can be a big help when it comes to putting together a business continuity plan. Although environment monitoring doesn’t directly tie into computer and software support, MSPs typically help provide environment monitoring in a data center environment; that experience can easily be modified to fit the needs of any size business.

Monitor and protect your assets as part of your New Year’s resolutions

Adding environment monitoring to your business continuity plan is often very easy, and can be done at far less of an expense than you might expect. Depending on the size of your organization’s physical space, you may be able to be alerted proactively to any environment changes with just one monitor and a few specific sensors.

Every business should be monitoring for temperature and humidity, along with flood. Adding in monitoring for smoke detection, room entry, or power loss will help enhance the environment factors you are keeping an eye on, increasing your organization’s uptime.

Last year it was estimated that businesses lost $700 Billion due to outages. Don’t let your organization add to that staggering loss in 2017. Make sure your business has environment monitoring as a key part of your business continuity plan, and resolve to be more productive (and make more revenue!) this coming year.