in 2020

Happy New Year! It’s the start of a new year, and a new decade. Every year it seems like we make grand plans for change and then never follow through with them. But when you have a worthy and attainable result, accomplishing your resolutions brings a feeling of satisfaction at the end of the year unlike anything else. The same can be said on an organizational level too–and change is much harder there! With that in mind, here are a few resolutions worthy of keeping all year round.

1. Commit to a stronger security stance: There’s no such thing as too much security. If you’re up to date with the latest network security vulnerabilities or ransomware strains, consider educating your fellow colleagues on what you know and promoting a culture of security throughout your organization. When everyone from the CISO down to the intern recognizes and understands best security practices, it makes your company that much less susceptible to security breaches caused by human error (like phishing scams or social engineering). Keep in mind that this is a long-term goal–it won’t happen overnight. Start with a small, key group of people open to organizational change.
2. Focus more on core business goals: This seems like it’s stating the obvious here, but it’s good to remind yourself of exactly what a company does: They create new and innovative solutions that solve complex problems, or help patients heal faster, or simply deliver specific services faster and more easily to customers. If there’s something that’s distracting you from accomplishing any of these broader business objectives, what can you do to remove it? Are you bogged down by constant infrastructure worry? Consider outsourcing your cloud management to a third party so you can focus on accomplishing bigger and better things. Or, if your infrastructure isn’t as robust as you would like, partner with a service provider with a powerful cloud you can call your own to run your business on or offer to your customers.
3. Improve disaster recovery RPO/RTOs and decrease downtime: Ain’t nobody got time for downtime. Being knocked offline for even an hour can have disastrous consequences for small and medium-sized businesses. How’s your disaster recovery strategy look this year? If you’re unhappy with your current recovery times, change them. That could include increasing your backups or checking out cloud-based disaster recovery as a service. Decreasing your recovery time from 24 hours to 4 hours can have a huge effect on your business. It may even help you accomplish goal #2 –focus more on core business goals.

So, what are your organization’s 2020 New Year’s resolutions? If they’re anything like the above, Otava can help you achieve them. We offer hybrid cloud, disaster recovery, cloud backup, security and colocation solutions so businesses can focus more on helping customers and worry less about their IT infrastructure. Visit www.otava.com to learn more.

Curious for other IT New Year’s resolutions? Check out last year’s blog post, 3 security resolutions to keep in 2019.