By: Mark Richmond, President/CEO of Micro Doctor IT

Ransomware is a virus that encrypts the files on a computer and any network shared drives attached to that PC. Businesses are being hit with ransomware at an alarming pace. Once those files are encrypted there are 2 options: pay the ransom (averaging $1500.00 in Bitcoins) or restore from an unaffected backup.

It’s a fact of life. Events out of your control can disrupt your business operations. While you can’t necessarily control the unexpected, you can take some precautions to prevent most business disruptions. Here are some key business continuity strategies that organizations across the globe rely on to keep their doors open.

Disasters. They do happen -- it’s only a matter of ‘when’. While most businesses acknowledge it, surveys show that only one in four companies worldwide have adequate protection in the event of a major disruption. We’re not talking about insurance here, but a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan that could save you thousands of dollars in losses and worse, a business closure.

There is nothing worse than having a productive day at the office become undone due to a power outage. Losing power for even a single minute can have far reaching effects on your company’s operations as you need to make sure everything is running properly and all data is accounted for.

Natural disasters have increased exponentially in the last few years - something that has resulted in a number of small and medium-sized business owners turning to business interruption insurance for protection. Covering many scenarios that regular business insurance simply ignores, adequate protection can be the make-or-break factor when it comes to surviving a natural or manmade catastrophe.

Do you know when to invoke your Business Continuity Plan? A lot of business owners assume they know when it will be required, but the reality is that it can be hard to determine when a BCP is really necessary. It’s important you are able to assess what is taking place, and make an informed decision with regard to putting your continuity strategy into action.

When your employees see snow on the ground, the thought of a day off immediately pops into their heads. Of course your customers are still reliant on you to provide the goods and services they have come to expect from your business. Before a storm hits, you should be communicating with both staff and clients to inform them of the situation.

Next month on April 8, 2014, Microsoft will stop supplying security updates and patches for Windows XP and Office 2003. So does that mean you have to instantly replace all your computers running Windows XP?

Micro Doctor previously had about 20 Servers in our Warren, Ohio corporate office and data center. A couple of years ago we started a project to virtualize our data center servers. This means that we transitioned what were previously many separate physical servers, into just a few physical machines that each hold multiple virtualized servers. The reasons we wanted to do this were ease of management, lower cost of hardware per server