That’s perfectly understandable. If a serious incident threatens your business, the priority is to keep everyone safe, and then to try and protect your core operations. You want your business to live to fight another day, so getting business-critical functions up and running again as quickly as possible is a chief concern.
But disruption comes in different forms. As we see from the Covid pandemic, something that starts out as an emergency response can morph into a long-term expedient.
Learning to live with disruption
In March 2020, many businesses had to shutter workplaces and transition to remote working almost overnight. In some cases, that meant employees connecting to corporate networks on personal devices, or using the home landline to make business calls. It may not have been the most secure or efficient way of working, but it meant many organisations could just about muddle through in the short-term. Covid struck and lockdown happened, but the lights stayed on.
But Covid didn’t go away. Businesses have had to learn to live with pandemic disruptions and get on with it anyway. Today the trick is no longer about surviving the economic calamity of Covid. It’s about thriving in spite of it.
The same could be said for a whole range of potential business disruptions. If the forecasters are right, extreme weather events are likely to become more common over the coming years. And remember, a flood doesn’t need to hit your headquarters to disrupt your business. It only needs to hit the far eastern factory that supplies an important component, or the data centre that houses your IT infrastructure.
Other threats can seem more mundane, but can be just as disruptive. Increasing traffic congestion might make commuting to your office unattractive to workers with other options. Or maybe you operate in a town or city centre that becomes an air pollution action zone and bans cars altogether.
The inevitability of disruption
There are scores of other threats that can affect your ability to do business, from cybercrime to a particularly virulent flu season. It’s natural to focus on the most calamitous situations, like hurricanes and once-in-a-lifetime pandemics. But in reality a business continuity issue is anything that undermines your ability to operate for any length of time. These issues are not always sexy, but they do have to be considered as part of your contingency planning.
That planning has to accept the inevitability of disruption, and ensure your business can operate efficiently and productively even when conditions are less than ideal for long periods. Climate change, cybercrime and economic downturns may continually test organisational resilience. You not only want to survive in such circumstances, you need to thrive. With the right systems in place, you can.
To put it simply, those systems should maximise flexibility. An agile business can switch to home working overnight, without missing a customer call. It can watch as its servers float away on flood waters, and spin up another iteration of its data and services in seconds. It can suffer a serious equipment theft, and quickly have staff up and running again on personal devices equipped with a full suite of communications and productivity tools.
IT resilience is crucial
As all this suggests, resilient IT infrastructure will be crucial here. Downtime is the enemy of successful business, and though customers might be sympathetic to your situation, if you can’t serve their needs they’ll go elsewhere. According to one survey, more than a third of SMBs have lost customers due to downtime.
Your business continuity planning needs to include ways to minimise downtime, regardless of circumstance. Cloud services are the obvious answer. Cloud-based services mean that, should disaster strike one location, your organisation can simply relocate to another and be up and running again in a couple of hours.
And if employees need to work remotely, they can do so and take all of their familiar apps and services with them. A good cloud provider will house your data and services in multiple dispersed data centres, so if one goes down your productivity and efficiency will be entirely unaffected.
The takeaway here is that business disruption doesn’t always arrive in the form of a sudden emergency, and it’s not always over in a couple of days. Sometimes you need to learn to live with less-than-ideal circumstances and be productive and efficient anyway. The right IT infrastructure is your best guarantee that disruption will never turn into disaster.