Decade of Innovation: Navigating IT and Disaster Recovery

Introduction

A lot can change in a decade, especially in IT, where technical solutions and disaster recovery strategies are constantly evolving (and with the recent surge in natural disasters, the latter is probably a good thing.) What hasn’t changed is Wayne Curtiss’s commitment to staying ahead of best practices and cutting-edge technology to ensure that Charles IT’s clients are always prepared.

As the Head of Strategy, Wayne has played a role in nearly every aspect of Charles IT’s innovation, leadership, and IT evolution. Because of his experience, he even has tips on disaster recovery too. So, let’s take a closer look at Wayne’s journey and how his expertise continues to shape the future of Charles IT.

Wayne’s Role as Head of Strategy

You could say that Wayne has been at Charles IT since the beginning, considering that he started as a system administrator back when the company had just about a dozen people. Thanks to his prior experience in the banking industry and another Managed Service Provider (MSP), he quickly grew into a leadership role as a team lead. But after five years, Wayne’s focus shifted beyond day-to-day operations to shaping the company’s broader vision. Now, as the Head of Strategy, he plays a key role in strategic initiatives and product development.

So what does that actually mean?

“Every single new product that we develop or start to roll out is going through me and my team to make sure that it’s vetted for customer use and is appropriate for the market we’re in,” Wayne explained.

He also focuses on best practices, coaching technical teams, and integrating new solutions. Basically, if there’s a challenge, Wayne is the one deciding what makes sense to change and how to apply solutions to clients who need them most. He noted that this shift became even more important a few years ago when Charles IT started investing in compliance tools.

Because he works across multiple departments, including sales, finance, and procurement, to package and roll out products effectively, Wayne sees himself as a technical integrator too.

“I work with account managers to make sure they know how to sell the product that we made. I work with finance to make sure they know how to bill for the product we set up. I work with techs to make sure they know how to deploy the product. I work with [procurement] to make sure they know how to quote it… I’m going across all the departments to make sure everyone knows how to do the thing,” Wayne said.

That doesn’t mean he’s doing it all alone, though. His team recently expanded, by exactly one person to help keep everyone on the same page.

“We’re also making sure that the team leads are all aligned on the best practices that go along with those products and the best practices that we get from Microsoft, Cisco, all the other vendors out there, to make sure that they’re all aligned and getting deployed the same way for all of our customers,” Wayne detailed.

Path to IT & Disaster Recovery Expertise

It’s no surprise that Wayne has his hand in everything at a tech company since he’s been immersed in IT best practices long before joining Charles IT. His career started in the banking industry, where he developed a strong understanding of compliance, policy, and security. From there, he moved on to another MSP, gaining broad exposure to IT solutions and disaster recovery fundamentals.

“I’ve just had a good foundation of disaster recovery, business continuity, business impact analysis — just knowing what things are important for small businesses to focus on. So that really gave me a good baseline for my career, and I’ve been here for 10 years because of it,” he said.

But you could say Wayne’s passion for technology started long before his professional career.

“I’ve always been working with technology. I started in web design actually, which was kind of new at the time, back in the early 2000s in high school. I got to go to a web design class, got hooked on it, started working for the town as a technical intern,” Wayne recalled.

He went on to study web design at the University of Hartford, enrolling in the school’s first program of its kind to offer a Bachelor of Arts degree. That decision paid off with Wayne crediting his major for getting him into coding and deepening his understanding of how computers work.

That same passion Wayne had back then is what’s kept him at Charles IT for over a decade.

 

“I just love getting new things to work on every day… Every quarter, I feel like I’m doing a different job because I get a new problem, a new thing to solve, and it just keeps me going because I get to try something new,” he said.

The Culture of Innovation: Dev Nights

One thing that makes Wayne’s job even more interesting is the Dev Nights he hosts once a month at Charles IT. If you’re wondering how he gets people to stay late at work, well, free pizza and beer are involved, but that’s not the only reason. Dev Night is a grassroots initiative where employees collaborate to solve IT challenges in a relaxed setting.

While the food and drinks might be the initial draw, these sessions benefit both the team and the company. Employees get to focus on business problems, explore new solutions, and refine best practices, all while working together in a casual, creative environment.

“A lot of times it just sparks new ideas of what we want out of a best practice or a solution. And they end up being a fun time where we can all just kind of get together and talk about problems that we’re facing, and try to come up with solutions together,” Wayne divulged.

Beyond brainstorming, Dev Nights give everyone a deeper understanding of the technology they’re using, like where it came from, why it was chosen, and how best practices were developed. Plus, attendees get a sneak peek into up-and-coming products or solutions and even have a say in shaping them.

Once a quarter, these sessions take the form of “Stack Chats,” where the team tries to “stump the Schwab” by questioning why they use certain products and debating alternative solutions.

“That’s benefited the technicians a lot in that way and benefits Charles IT by developing better solutions, because you’ve got multiple people in there trying things out, and more perspectives always lead to better outcomes,” Wayne added.

Of course, another win is that many Dev Nights end with a fun happy hour, which is just another reason they’ve become a core part of Charles IT’s company culture!

Key Business Solutions

With Wayne’s years of expertise, both on the job and at Dev Nights, it’s worth asking: What’s the most important technical solution for businesses today?

Without hesitation, Wayne answered: Microsoft 365.

To him, it’s essential for modern business operations because it’s at the core of access, communication, and IT infrastructure. Essentially, it’s what keeps most businesses running.

“If you think about your day when you go to work, you’re working in Outlook, you’re working in Teams, you’re working in SharePoint, you’re opening Word documents. That’s going to be the bulk of what most people do to run a business, just having that type of communication and access at their fingertips,” Wayne explained.

He even pointed to Microsoft 365 when asked about the biggest shift he’s seen over the years. As he put it, the Microsoft 365 solution stack has become increasingly comprehensive, transforming how businesses operate.

“The move to modern workplace and modern desktop technologies has really changed a lot of the structure of how you set up your businesses. Now you can be born in the cloud. You can have all of your stuff live in the cloud. You don’t necessarily need on-premises servers,” Wayne elaborated.

This shift allows businesses to be more flexible since they’re no longer tied to a single location or geography. With everything in the cloud, companies can support a more dispersed workforce, enabling employees to work from anywhere. It’s safe to say that is a capability that’s become increasingly important to a lot of people in a post-COVID world.

 

Disaster Recovery: Challenges & Best Practices

Another thing Wayne emphasized as critical for all businesses is having a Disaster Recovery Plan in place.

“Disaster recovery for small businesses is the most important thing that they should really be worried about when you talk about their IT systems, because it’s what gets you back up when something goes wrong. And in this day and age, something’s always going wrong, whether it’s hackers, a traditional disaster like a weather event, or something like a fire that could take out your business,” Wayne explained.

Many businesses underestimate their risk exposure too. But throughout his career, Wayne has seen countless disasters where clients needed to recover quickly to keep operations running. The issue? Some businesses don’t fully understand how much they stand to lose or for how long.

“The biggest gap is usually people not realizing where their threshold or their tolerance for loss is, whether it’s the loss of business function for a certain amount of time while you recover from that event, or loss of data, like needing to go back to a backup from two weeks ago, which means recreating all of that work from the last two weeks,” he said.

That’s why at Charles IT backups are taken every hour so businesses never have to worry about losing weeks of data. Instead of facing the nightmare scenario of losing critical files or paying a ransom in the event of a cyberattack, businesses should proactively secure their data with a tested backup strategy.

“If a hacker gets ahead of us and is able to get into your environment and encrypt all your files, the only thing we can do is either pay the ransom or go back to a backup. So having that disaster recovery plan and having that proven, tested backup is really what you’re going to be reliant on in those types of situations,” Wayne said.

The best way to stay ahead of hackers and cyber threats? Test your disaster recovery plan often.

“Try to test as many scenarios as you can, test it as often as you can, and test it as fully as you can,” Wayne advised. “You really have to put it through the paces and have a comprehensive test at least once a year to keep yourself ready for when that disaster happens.”

Conclusion

It’s clear that Wayne has made an impact on Charles IT and beyond. From training employees on best practices to leading Dev Nights that spark innovation, to ensuring businesses have the right technology, like Microsoft 365, and for tips on having a rock-solid disaster recovery plan, his influence is everywhere.

If there’s one thing to emphasize from this, it’s that staying ahead of cyber threats, optimizing business operations, and having a tested backup strategy can make all the difference when challenges arise.

What’s one IT product or best practice that’s made a big difference in your business? Drop your thoughts in the comments!

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