Imagine managing a bustling healthcare clinic where patients rely on timely access to care and critical medical information. The day is running smoothly until, suddenly, a power outage disrupts access to patient records, or worse, a cyberattack compromises sensitive data, leaving both staff and patients in confusion. Operations grind to a halt, appointments are delayed, and patient care is impacted. It’s a stressful scenario, but with a well-prepared Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and our dedicated team at Nomerel by your side, your clinic can stay resilient and keep things moving, even during unexpected crises.
Unexpected chaos can strike any business at any time. One moment, you’re basking in the glory of running a successful establishment; the next, you’re thrown against a wall, staring at a crisis that could disrupt your entire business. Don’t let this be your story.
At Nomerel, we specialize in helping businesses prepare for the unexpected. In this blog, we’ll share key steps to create a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that works for you and ensures your business stays up and running, even in the face of disaster.
Key Steps for Successful Business Continuity Planning
Here’s how you can stay resilient, no matter what challenges come your way:
1. Identify and Prioritize What’s Most Important for Your Business
Every business has vital functions that must continue, no matter the situation. The first step in building a solid BCP is identifying these business-critical resources, a process Nomerel specializes in. Once you’ve figured that out, try to understand how sudden disruptions can affect these functions.
For instance, if you run a retail store, your point-of-sale systems and inventory management would be business-critical. Any disruptions to these could result in lost sales or poor customer experience. At Nomerel, we help businesses pinpoint these key functions, so they can keep things running smoothly—even during a disruption.
2. Develop a Comprehensive Plan
It’s not enough to just know what’s important—you also need a clear, step-by-step plan to minimize downtime. Nomerel collaborates with businesses to design these detailed, actionable plans, assigning roles and responsibilities so everyone knows their part when a disruption occurs.
For example, if your primary server goes down, your IT team should be ready to switch to a backup server, while your customer service team handles client communication. Our team at Nomerel ensures plans are easy to follow, providing a fast and organized response.
3. Use the Latest Technology to Protect Your Data
One of the biggest threats to business continuity is data loss. That’s why leveraging the modern technology that Nomerel offers our clients, like cloud backups and failover systems, is crucial. These tools ensure that even if your systems go down, your data remains secure and accessible.
For instance, a law firm might use cloud storage to back up client files regularly, so even in the event of a cyberattack, the data is retrievable when needed. At Nomerel, we help businesses implement these critical technologies to ensure their operations stay secure and efficient.
4. Train Your Team and Test the Plan
Even the best continuity plan won’t work if your team isn’t ready to implement it. Regular training and testing with your staff and Nomerel’s expertise ensures that everyone knows their role and can act quickly in an emergency. Running mock scenarios also helps you spot potential weaknesses and make improvements.
For example, a healthcare provider might simulate a system outage to ensure staff know how to access patient records through backup systems. Nomerel works with businesses to create and lead training and testing,ensuring your team is prepared when it matters most.
5. Involve Key Stakeholders
Your business continuity plan should involve input from your key team members. Gathering feedback from managers, IT personnel, and other critical staff ensures that your plan is both practical and comprehensive.
For example, your accounting team might have unique concerns about maintaining access to financial data during an outage. Our dedicated team at Nomerel helps businesses involve all relevant stakeholders in the planning process, so no detail is overlooked.
6. Monitor and Improve Continuously
Business continuity is an ongoing process, and your plan should evolve as your business grows or as new threats emerge. After a disruption, gather feedback collaborate with us at Nomerel to strengthen your continuity strategies.
For instance, after a network outage, you might implement additional failover systems or improve customer communication protocols. At Nomerel, we work with businesses to regularly review and update their plans, ensuring they stay ready for whatever comes next.
Continuity Planning Simple with Nomerel
We know that planning for the unexpected can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re running a small or mid-sized business. But you don’t have to do it alone.
At Nomerel, we offer expert guidance every step of the way, from identifying your critical operations to implementing advanced failover systems.
Let us help you build a business continuity plan that keeps your operations running, even when disaster strikes.
Nomerel is a Managed IT Service Provider headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nomerel specializes in delivering cost-effective and reliable technology solutions for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in 2008, Nomerel has evolved from a break-fix company to a proactive business partner that offers IT support, cybersecurity, and vCIO services, helping businesses maintain and optimize their IT infrastructure. With a focus on agility and simplicity, Nomerel ensures businesses can stay competitive without the need for in-house IT expertise.
Modern technology is making businesses more efficient, more organized and more successful than ever before, but what happens when things go wrong? While sophisticated tech systems offer huge benefits for business, there comes a risk of operations grinding to a halt when IT problems crop up. To mitigate the impact of computer, phone and server issues on that all-important bottom line, it is essential that reliable IT support is on hand to resolve problems as soon as they crop up.
Here a Nomerel, we’re particularly proud of our IT support offerings. No matter if you’re an existing customer of ours or you’ve never worked with us before, we can provide all the computer help you need to keep your business up and running.
Remote Vs On-site IT Support in Tulsa and Beyond
Many IT problems can be resolved remotely these days, particularly if it’s a software issue that’s to blame, and we’ve found that remote IT support is the most common type of computer help we have on offer. With remote support, we work to get your computer, server or phone issues fixed from our offices by remotely accessing your business devices. By removing the need for an engineer to travel to your business premises, we can get IT issues resolved much faster and with fewer complications.
In the rare event that an IT problem can’t be resolved remotely, our engineers can visit your business’ premises to deliver computer help there. Since we’re based in Tulsa, we can provide on-site support for businesses throughout northeastern Oklahoma. We find that on-site IT support in Tulsa is most common for area businesses that are implementing new IT systems or have big projects going on that require additional IT requirements. On-site support is also valuable for training employees on the use of IT or phone systems.
Ongoing Vs Emergency IT Support
A great deal of the computer help we offer is non-emergency assistance or maintenance. In these instances, we recommend that you drop us an email outlining your problem. When you send us an email a ticket will automatically be generated, meaning that your issue is instantly waiting in line to be dealt with by one of our engineers. We find that we can respond to email requests much faster than phone calls when it comes to non-emergency IT issues, so email should be your first port of call when you need computer help.
If you have an emergency IT problem that you need us to deal with, we recommend that you give us a call so that we know your issue should be dealt with urgently. We know how frustrating it can be to have day-to-day business impacted by tech problems, so we make sure to prioritize urgent issues in order to minimize the impact on your business. Be sure to get in touch as soon as possible when an emergency pops up – the sooner we know about it, the sooner we can help.
You can call us on the following numbers:
(918) 806-9000 if you’re in the Tulsa area
(844) 666-3735 for Toll-Free
If you’re not sure whether your IT issue is an emergency or not, just give us a call! We understand that sometimes it’s simpler to have a chat over the phone than to try to explain complex IT issues via email. If in doubt, pick up the phone.
Easy Access to Tech Support with Managed IT
When your business is utilizing technology on a daily basis, it’s important that your employees know what to do when they come up against IT problems. Our Managed IT Service is an excellent solution for businesses that want their staff to have access to computer professionals at the drop of a hat. For an affordable monthly fee, we provide ongoing IT support that covers both software and hardware issues, as well as problems relating to your phone systems and servers.
Our Managed IT package also includes 24/7 monitoring of your entire business’s tech systems, which can help you to avoid IT problems in the first place. We keep an eye out for signs of IT issues before they happen so that we can prevent them from turning into major emergencies. Prevention is always better than cure.
The Managed IT service is a popular option for small businesses because it gives complete peace of mind that computer experts are on hand, no matter what. We’re available to resolve your urgent IT problems and can work directly with your employees to fix issues as soon as possible. Plus, we’re available to help you, the business owner, with non-urgent issues such as integrating new technology or scaling up your IT systems. You’ll never have to worry about your computers, servers or phone systems again.
Contact Us to Discuss Your Tech Support Needs
No matter if you’re an existing customer or we are yet to meet, we’re ready and waiting to give you all the computer help you need. Get in touch now for help with a specific technology problem, or to discuss ongoing IT support that will help your business thrive.
Congratulations, your workplace, computers, and vital data have made it through another year! Or have they? It’s time to say goodbye to 2019 and hello to 2020, which makes it the perfect opportunity to reflect on the past year’s successes – and failures – in terms of data protection and IT management.
Data privacy has been a major topic in the news throughout 2019, with many organizations hitting the headlines when they fell victim to data loss or theft. As businesses continue to advance their technology systems, the risk to vital data is increasing. From hardware and software failures to natural disasters, genuine human error to targeted theft by hackers, there are many ways in which sensitive data can be leaked, lost, or passed into the wrong hands. In 2020 and beyond it won’t be enough to simply deal with these issues as and when they come up. Instead, businesses and organizations are expected to be proactive when it comes to protecting personal data.
As a managed IT company we’ve seen firsthand the impact that poor data protection can have on businesses in Tulsa Oklahoma. We’re passionate about helping businesses to become proactive in the protection of their valuable data. Here are three key services we recommend every business owner implements in 2020 to ensure their company data is safe from hardware failure, hackers, and natural disasters.
Offsite Cloud Data Backup Services
Many businesses are under the impression that onsite data backups are enough to protect their data should they experience failures of their computer systems. Sadly, they’re wrong. Backing up to onsite servers won’t protect data if the business is affected by fire, flood or extended power outage, or if its hardware is stolen.
To provide the best level of protection, data should be backed up to a secondary site. Cloud data backup is a fantastic solution because it ensures vital data remains available no matter what happens on business premises. If you have to close your offices for one reason or another, a cloud backup will allow you to continue to access critical data and keep your business running from an alternative site.
Our extensive managed data backup services ensure copies of your data are available both onsite and offsite. We’ll consider every possibility for data loss to ensure valuable information is thoroughly protected, no matter what happens.
Comprehensive Disaster Recovery Services
We’re well aware that it isn’t always possible to alleviate every potential risk to business operations, no matter how proactive a business is. However, companies can minimize the impact of disasters on their operations by having robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place.
Data backup is just one crucial aspect of disaster recovery. There’s also hardware, software, networking equipment, and communications tools to consider, as well as the practicalities of finding alternative workspaces. Without a comprehensive recovery strategy in place, disaster could lead to business operations grinding to a complete halt, which might lead to financial losses too extreme to recover from.
Our recovery services are tailor-made to each of our clients. We take into account the size, industry, and unique circumstances of every business to develop a strategy that will help them recover from disaster and continue to thrive, even in the most challenging circumstances.
Managed IT Services
With technology evolving at such a swift pace in the 21st century, it can be tricky for business owners to choose the right IT solutions for their operations. As a managed IT company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, our aim is to take the pressure off by implementing and managing technology systems that are the best fit for each individual business.
Our all-inclusive managed IT services include 24/7 monitoring of our clients’ computer and network systems, which means we can spot potential problems in advance and rectify them as swiftly as possible. We work quickly to resolve hardware failures – with no extra labor costs – and we pride ourselves on delivering exceptional engineer support to get IT issues resolved with minimal delays. All of these factors help to prevent critical data loss.
Our IT company is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but we also serve parts of Northeastern Arkansas and Kansas. We manage IT for businesses in a vast range of industries, including oil and gas, manufacturing, medicine, law, retail, and more. We can customize our offerings for every business, meaning that you’ll get managed IT support that comprehensively manages and protects your data.
Make 2020 the year of data protection.
For busy business owners, using the services of an IT company brings peace of mind when it comes to managing data. With quality data backup and recovery services in place, you can focus on growing your business instead of losing sleep over the possibility of data disasters. If you are ready to make 2020 the year you stopped worrying about data failures, be sure to give Nomerel a call.
Almost every business owner we consult with for the first time has a story about losing valuable business data. The type of data and the way in which it is lost varies from business to business, but the ultimate reason for the data loss is almost always the same; there is not a suitable data backup plan in place.
Today businesses are storing more digital data than ever before, but keeping that data secure and easily accessible is not as straightforward as it seems. For growing companies, it can seem simple and effective enough to upload files to consumer cloud backup services like Dropbox, but often such platforms don’t provide adequate data security. Furthermore, many businesses don’t consider how they’ll recover if the worst does happen to their data. When IT disaster strikes, these businesses don’t have a strategy in place to handle it, leaving them at risk of losing essential systems and data that could put a sudden stop to all business operations.
Business Data. What Could Go Wrong?
The potential for disaster is everywhere when it comes to business data. Software can crash, hardware can fail, and malware can be inadvertently installed, leading to unauthorized systems access or disruption or damage to computers. Simple human error could lead to the accidental loss of data, or theft of network hardware might occur. Hardware could be damaged during natural disasters such as fires, floods or in our region tornados. Even something as simple as a common power outage could lead to data loss severe enough to stop a business operating.
While we can try to prevent these types of problems from occurring in the first place, it is not always possible to protect against every single possibility. Accidents, malfunctions, and natural disasters are often beyond our control. However, what businesses can control is what happens afterward. If they have a disaster recovery plan in place, including a sound data backup plan, they can restore their data and keep their business running. If, on the other hand, their backup data services aren’t up to scratch, they could risk losing their valuable data forever.
To learn more about the importance of professional disaster recovery plans, be sure to read about these three organizations which didn’t have such plans in place. Businesses across the world are losing millions of dollars worth of data every year, but you can avoid becoming one of them by getting your data security in order and formulating a sound disaster recovery strategy. That’s where we come in.
Backup Solutions Built For Small Business
Nomerel backup solutions are built into our managed IT service plans, which can be completely customized to your business.
With our managed IT solutions, your organization gets enterprise-level backup solutions, on-call IT support, and hardware failure solutions for one low monthly price. We also provide custom data backup services, a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, and business continuity plans to keep your business up and running no matter what happens. Plus, since we provide 24/7 monitoring of your technology systems, we can identify and cure many potential problems before they occur, which minimizes the risk of disaster.
When we build a custom IT solution for one of our clients, we charge them a fixed monthly bill for everything involved in that solution. This means that you, the business owner, won’t be faced with hefty extra costs if we do need to spend more time with you to deal with unforeseen issues. Our goal is to take the stress out of IT and data security so that you can focus on taking care of your business.
How Managed IT With Nomerel Works
Since 2008 Nomerel has been serving the Tulsa and Oklahoma City metropolitan area, and we have recently expanded into Northeastern Arkansas and Kansas. Our passion is helping businesses keep their data safe and backed-up, no matter what their size or industry. We work with small and mighty start-ups of just one employee, as well as longstanding corporations with over 1,000 members of staff. Our managed IT solutions can be completely adapted to suit the unique needs of every individual business perfectly.
When it comes to your bespoke managed IT solutions, we’ll begin with a consultation. We’ll sit down and talk about the current setup at your organization – how your data is currently managed, the risks involved, and the potential consequences of data loss. Then we will develop a foolproof business continuity plan to ensure you’re equipped for any disaster. For more information, be sure to give us a call or complete our contact form to arrange a consultation.
As we enter into a new decade it’s the perfect time to reflect on the ever-changing landscape of business security. Doing business in this era is nothing like it was in the Y2K days. Today your primary business assets are digital, from your employee data to customer data and everything in between. Depending on your industry, that data may be subject to a whole host of stringent laws in regard to how it is stored and protected. What happens if it gets lost, leaked or stolen? The consequences can be catastrophic.
Here at Nomerel, an Oklahoma IT company, we help businesses in dozens of industries, including medical, legal, oil and gas, and many others, to protect their masses of data. We’re talking millions of patient records, project files, multimedia files, archives, and numerous other pieces of valuable and often sensitive information. Not only do we protect this data, but we also help our clients to formulate a disaster recovery plan so that if the worst does happen, we can quickly get the situation under control.
We want to share the stories of three organizations that did not have a disaster recovery plan. Although not clients of ours, these stories are very similar to those experienced by businesses we’ve encountered right here in Oklahoma. Today, those businesses are our longstanding clients and have solid business continuity plans in place, but it is unfortunate that they had to learn the hard way about the dangers of data insecurity.
If you’re keen to protect the future of your business in the digital age, give us a call or complete our contact form to set up a meeting. We would love to talk about your business continuity plan; we think you might be surprised at how fast and cost-effective it is to implement.
How to protect your company from a digital ransom attack: this city in Florida paid a big price
In June this year, an entire city in Florida was hit with a data breach that cost an astounding $600,000. What’s even more shocking is that this case wasn’t the first of its kind. It is fairly common for government agencies to fall foul of hacking organizations who paralyze computer systems or steal data and demand a ransom for its release. Private companies are also vulnerable to these types of cyberattacks.
In this instance, Riviera Beach found itself facing disaster after an employee of the police department opened an email attachment that was infected with a virus that shut down the entire city’s online systems. Email, office phone systems, and water utility pump stations were impacted. The city was unable to process payroll and vendor payments.
The solution? First, the city was forced to bring forward a planned upgrade of its computer hardware by a year, to the cost of $900,000. Then it paid out an additional $600,000 ransom to the hackers responsible for the attack to recoup their valuable data.
The key point with this story is that Riviera Beach’s digital security was simply not up to scratch. Had they had a dedicated security strategy in place their systems would never have been infected. We can guarantee that preventative cybersecurity would have cost them a whole lot less than the $1.5 million it took to resolve the problem.
Anyone can create a data backup, but an IT company is going to make sure it is fail-proof
Remember the much-loved 1999 kids’ animation Toy Story 2? Well, it might surprise you to learn that due to a simple user error and a major issue with a data backup system, the whole movie was accidentally deleted while still in production. Hundreds of man-hours worth of work were erased in just minutes, and it took a gargantuan effort to get it back.
The issue came about when an employee accidentally triggered a command which began to systematically delete every file in the network. When it dawned on the Pixar team what was happening, they unplugged their master server to halt the deletions and then took a look over what was left. 90% of the movie had been deleted.
No problem, the team thought, we can just use our backup, right? Wrong. This was the crux of the problem. Unfortunately, the backup system had not been adequately checked. If it had, somebody would have realized that the backup system was not big enough to store all the data. New files were writing to the backup drive and pushing older files off. Only a minority of the necessary files were there.
Luckily there was something of a solution. One of the team members had recently been working from home. She had a computer at her house that had a full copy of the network from just a couple of weeks earlier. The team managed, over the course of a sleep-deprived weekend, to trawl through these files and compare them with those recovered from the backup and a series of files saved locally by animators and modelers. They rebuilt the movie – still with several thousand files missing – adequately enough that the project could get back on track.
What’s ironic about this story is that Pixar ended up scrapping, rewriting and rebuilding the movie all over again just a few months later, not because of another data error but because they wanted to make it better. But they certainly learned a lot from their mistakes the first time around, namely that a fail-proof business data backups system is a worthwhile investment when producing a multi-million dollar movie.
Think the Geek Squad is going to help your company? Wrong. This is one of the hundreds of stories – don’t risk it!
In 2008 consumer electronics retailer Best Buy was faced with a gigantic $54 million lawsuit. Why? They had lost a customer’s business laptop, and she was seeking damages not for the loss of the computer, but for the loss of her personal data.
She argued that Best Buy had completely disregarded the importance of protecting her data after her laptop went missing from a store in Tenleytown, D.C. She had taken the laptop there to have the company’s Geek Squad technicians deal with a repair. When she began to question the laptop’s whereabouts, Best Buy misled her about the computer’s location for weeks before finally admitting that it had been lost.
Not only is it appalling that Best Buy can lose electronics that contain valuable and sensitive personal information, but their methods for managing the issue were even worse. They offered the customer just $1110 dollars and a $500 gift card – enough to buy a new laptop, sure, but certainly not compensation enough for the loss of private data. It seemed like they weren’t taking the issue of data breach seriously enough, and the customer quite rightly wanted to make the company sit up and take note when she issued the massive lawsuit.
The lesson here is that we cannot take the protection of data lightly. There are myriad ways in which data can accidentally be lost and subsequently become vulnerable to fraud or exposure. Businesses must have stringent security measures in place to ensure that accidents like this don’t leave them losing either their own valuable data or, perhaps even worse, the personal data of their customers.
Don’t want to be the fourth story on this list? Reach out to us
We would love the opportunity to learn about your organization and discover which of our services would best suit your business. At Nomerel we are proactive; we have experience in every industry and will protect your data with care. We provide organizations with fail-proof data recovery plans throughout Oklahoma, Northwestern Arkansas, and Kansas. We build cost-effective, custom IT solutions that are tailored to your business’ exact needs, giving you everything you need and nothing you don’t. Allow us to bring simplicity and clarity to your IT environment so that you can have the freedom to focus on growing your business.
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