Technology is the heartbeat of modern medicine, which is why hospital IT budgets continue to grow every year. Whether your practice is struggling with data security or operational efficiency, managed services providers (MSPs) are an excellent option for IT support.

Even the best managed IT services provider (MSP) can overlook certain business continuity plan (BCP) details. This is why businesses should always be on the lookout for the following pitfalls of BCP to ensure that the plan works as it should.
Over-optimistic testing
The initial testing attempt is usually the most important, because it's when MSPs can pinpoint potential pain points in the recovery plan.

Companies that rely heavily on customer service and sales need a reliable, efficient, and effective telecommunications system. If that system breaks down even for just a day, the resulting losses can be significant. This is why you would do well to protect the company’s Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony system.

Disaster recovery (DR) used to be an expensive solution that relied predominantly on tape backups. Today, cloud computing has dramatically changed the DR landscape, affording even small- and medium-sized businesses cheaper and more reliable DR solutions.

Many small- to medium-sized business (SMB) owners never expect a major crisis to hit their company and are often caught flat-footed when it does. Such events can cause downtime, which can lead to lost revenue and reduced profits. In addition, SMBs that fail to recover quickly from disruption face the risk of losing their customers to their competitors.

More than being a global health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is also upending the global economy. Many businesses find themselves facing the grim reality that if they don’t find a way to adapt to the crisis, they’ll end up closing their doors for good.

Unforeseen disasters can strike at any time, and when they do, your business could come to a grinding halt. Having a business continuity plan could prevent this from happening by securing your valuable business data at another location. But all too often, data backup can be too complicated for the average IT personnel to manage.

More and more healthcare organizations are turning to managed services providers (MSPs) for their IT needs. This lets hospitals and clinics focus on being healthcare providers and not on being ad hoc IT professionals learning on the fly.

Here are some things to look for in a managed services provider before you consider partnering with one.

Business continuity plans are designed to protect an organization's critical data in case of a crisis, but employees are also a part of that equation. If you want a strong business continuity plan, it’s imperative you avoid the following mistakes.
Mistake #1: Failing to plan for employees
Companies that survive unexpected incidents are the ones that thought about their employees’ needs.

Any business owner worth their salt knows the value of data to business. This is why it’s bizarre that many business owners don’t have a proper data backup strategy in place. Organizations of all sizes need to take a proactive approach to backing up their data, and there are several solutions they can implement to do that.