If You Use Time Warner You Might Not Be Able To Read This

There was (is) a huge outage on the Time Warner Internet Access Network this morning.  Starting around 4:30am a maintenance upgrade has gone horribly wrong.  Which is to say, if your on Time Warner Cable it’s likely you can’t read this (until your service is restored, anyway).

Here’s the constantly updating map of the Time Warner Network online status.  Just like weather radar…  Red is bad, green is good.

http://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable/map/

The cost of this?  Well, Time Warner won’t lose all that much money.  It’s not likely that they will give credits/refunds for a few hours of downtime.  But, if your business is on Time Warner, it could cost a ton of bucks.  Can’t process orders?  Credit Card and Check payments?  Access suppliers?  Put that big “one day” promotion online?  Can’t do that if your Internet is down.

Which brings us to the real purpose of this little screed about the incompetence that is Time Warner Cable’s latest faux pas…  If your business relies on the Internet (and few do not anymore), you really need to have a plan in place for when bad things happen.  It’s not always bringing in a competitive alternate Internet feed, either.

What you really need is a team of people that have “been there, done that” and work with them to make incidents out of your direct control nothing more than a minor hiccup…  Instead of a money draining loss.

Give OPENRSM a call (or email), and let’s get your business back online and have your business prepared for when bad things happen.

Tornado Proof your Business

It is Tornado season here in the Midwest, which makes for plenty of time in the basement listening to the weatherman and wondering if you’ll have a business to go to in the morning.  Well, you can replace inventory, fix a building, etc. but your data (accounting, sales, invoices, payroll records, etc.) is another story entirely.

And simply copying stuff to a USB Hard disk doesn’t cut it either.  What if your software is a couple revisions back?  Will the new, current version of your accounting system read that old data?  And if your backup is bad, then what do you do?  And we would lay odds that you havn’t tested the recovery of data off of your old tape or USB Disk backups either.  So you don’t really know if your protected, or not.

But it’s okay.  You havn’t been hit with an EF4 yet.  So how about we suggest that by realizing that IT is a Process, Not a Project you can implement a solid strategy for data backup and recovery along with a disaster recovery plan that can help protect you from a big twister, monster hail storm, flood, or whatever else might hit your business.  And let you recover fast.

The ultimate solution should:

• Keep your Data Offsite and out of the region for better protection.
• Stored in a secure datacenter built for backup
• Include not only your data, but your programs as well
• And have a written “Plan of Action” so if bad things happen, you’ll know what to do, who to contact, and when.

Want to quit worrying about your business when the weather turns bad?  Get ahold of OPENRSM, Inc. at 816-200-2220, email us at [email protected], or fill out the form below and we’ll help you implement safegards such that IT is a Process, Not a Project so you’ll always know your safe.