5 Questions Businesses Need To Ask

Todd Scallan, vice president of product engineering at Axcient, a vendor of IT resiliency solutions – of which NetCenergy is a partner – based in Mountain View, Calif., posed these five questions business executives should ask to ensure their IT systems are resilient, and ready to handle a crisis:

• What are the systems you rely on to run your business, and how critical are they?
• What are the ramifications of each system going down, and can you quantify it in terms of lost revenue or lost opportunity cost, and employee productivity?
• What are the potential causes of these systems going down? (such as viruses or user errors)
• If you have an outage, what's your recovery plan?
• How often do you test your recovery plan, and what do the tests show you?

The following is an interview with Nick Pegley, vice president of solutions and services business development with All Covered, a division of Konica Minolta Business Solutions USA, and an Axicent channel partner. The interview was edited for brevity and clarity.