Business continuity is one of the most important things a business should focus on. What is it? In a nutshell, your ability to continue supplying your goods and services to customers in the event of an unexpected event. Unscheduled downtime is a serious concern because it not only causes you monetary loss but also considerably harms your reputation amongst customers.
Key understanding of how to achieve business continuity is an investment all businesses should be making – particularly SMEs.
What damages business continuity?
There are a litany of things that can cause your business to become inoperable for a period of time. Some may only cause ten minutes of disruption. Others can see businesses ground to a halt for a solid week. Depending on the nature of the disruption, and its severity, it can become a very costly situation.
Take for example a geological event that causes damage to your building or your power. A freak lightning storm fries your junction boxes. Or you’re the subject of a malicious attack and all of the machines in your network become infected, rendering them inoperable.
Anything that prevents you readily accessing your daily essential data and serving your customers is going to render your business immobile. Ensuring continuity for these events is beyond important – don’t wait for it to happen to develop a plan!
What can you do?
No two businesses are alike. That means the disaster recovery plans of no two businesses will be alike, either. So any step towards ensuring business continuity must begin with an extensive consultation with industry professionals. They’ll not only be well versed in the common types of threats businesses such as yours face but also have the ability to intuitively understand your system.
Storing and backing up data remotely is an excellent step towards ensuring business continuity. Keeping important information off premises means it isn’t going to be affected if something shuts your operation down. Even if it’s just keeping records so you can start calling customers to let them know what’s going on – it’s something.
The more you can embrace cloud solutions to as many common business practices as possible, the better protected you’ll be from suffering a shut down of your business.
Establishing and regularly updating recovery points is another key way to ensure business continuity. A recovery point allows you to basically “roll back” your system to how it was at a certain point in time. This is particularly useful in cases of malware attack. This means you don’t have to spend valuable time re-installing and re-calibrating key operating systems in the event of an incident.
Business continuity is exceptionally important, and you shouldn’t wait for an incident before you invest in it.