Seriously.  We conducted a mission critical, emergency offsite test for our company I Know IT last Friday.. what we didn’t tell our clients is that we’d be busy taking care of their IT systems while soaking up some rays, enjoying some waves and better yet.. being more productive at.. the beach!  If you haven’t read “the fun stuff” take a look now, watch the videos and give us your feedback.

Whilst it was a successful day in a unique location, a LOT of planning went into this, and what we want to share with you is just how critical it is for your company to consider what would happen if you needed to relocate your organisation offsite during an evacuation, a flood, a fire or any other reason why you could not operate from your office.  Remember, we had 2 weeks to plan this from design to implementation.  We have a written plan which is now permanently in our operations manual and a set of notes to go by in case this really does happen.  What would your organisation do in a disaster? [...]

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been alerting our clients to the fact that we would be conducting a real life disaster recovery scenario where we would close down our office, relocate our entire team offsite and enact a full day of business without impact to our clients who depend on us to be available for IT support calls.  What we didn’t do is tell them where we were planning on going, perhaps because they wouldn’t have believed it was anything more than an excuse to take the crew down to the beach for the day and shirk our many, many responsibilities.  But really, we did go to the beach, and we did work.. and it was an incredible success.

Caught on film.. [...]

Over the past week I’ve spent time with various peer groups in Sydney including HTG, a specialist group of leading IT and Managed Services providers globally of which I Know IT is a member, as well as Connectwise, the leading platform for these same types of organisations.

One of the key discussions that has shadowed this and previous meetings is the sudden influence of Apple over the organisations we service.
Up until recently, many company’s had a predominant IT platform and were either staunchly PC with perhaps a handful of Macs not connected to many of the mainstream resources such as servers and backup systems, reserved for those who refused to work with anything else – versus Mac, where people would actually leave the company if so much as a PC were to be found in the organisation for fear of Microsoft penetrating their minds. [...]