There’s no greater cost saving than protecting your organisation from the worst effects of a natural disaster or cybersecurity emergency. According to one report, the average mean cost of a cyber security breach for a small business in the UK is £11,000.
In other words, the cost of a business continuity crisis is likely to be far larger than the measures you put in place to prevent it.
In fact, go about it in the right way and businesses can actually protect themselves better and at the same time save money. That might sound unlikely, but it’s true. By analysing your IT infrastructure for the purposes of business continuity planning, you can also identify ways of reducing infrastructure costs.
For example, the business continuity benefits of cloud-based services and applications are well known. Quite simply, a fire, flood or robbery at your premises won’t be catastrophic if your crucial data and services are housed elsewhere. Good cloud service providers will save your data in multiple redundant locations, so if a flood or fire hits one data centre, your digital ecosystem will simply be spun up in another. In many cases you’ll barely be aware of the change.
In addition, whether it’s a global pandemic or severe winter, conditions that prevent staff having access to a central location aren’t such a problem if you can easily equip them for home working. Cloud-based communication and collaboration tools can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. Your people can work from just about anywhere.
Protect and save
So cloud services are a huge boost to business continuity planning. The win-win here is that they can also save you money. For example, with cloud services you no longer have to pay hardware maintenance contracts or dedicate IT man hours to keeping everything patched and upgraded. Your cloud provider should optimise your service and monitor it, too.
And in terms of communication, pick the right cloud solution for your needs and you’ll also save on call costs, with OpEx-based pay-as-you-go pricing ensuring you only ever pay for the capacity you use. Services like hosted voice also scale in seconds, letting you add and remove users as your requirement demands. You never have to pay for spare capacity “just in case”.
Short term outlay for long term savings
Hosted voice services let you slash equipment and software costs, too. A good unified communications (UC) solution will include everything you need, from audio and video calling to chat, text and collaboration tools. Choose wisely and you won’t have to fill in gaps with expensive third-party add ons.
Hosted voice services also include a softphone app, meaning they’ll work on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. You don’t need to invest in dedicated handsets unless you want to. With enterprise security built in, a good hosted UC service can even form the core of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy, letting staff use personal devices for work purposes.
Other IT infrastructure changes can also save you money in the long-term while making your business more resilient. Connectivity is an obvious example. Upgrading from copper to fibre, and from fibre to full fibre, is a simple and cost-effect way of reducing operational vulnerability.
As a rule, the more fibre your connection contains, the hardier it is. Fibre connections dropout far less frequently than copper equivalents, and also have significantly more capacity. If you ever have to quickly equip remote teams with apps and tools in the cloud, fibre has the speed and bandwidth to make it easy.
Put simply, replacing creaking copper connectivity with fibre slashes costs in the long term by creating a far more stable and robust network. And of course, faster connectivity makes your teams more productive and collaborative at any time.
Better businesses are better prepared
Many small businesses in particular are under the mistaken impression that protecting their operations is financially beyond them. For example, a new survey by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) found that, compared to a year ago, fewer businesses now deploy security monitoring tools and fewer report having up-to-date malware protection.
Cybersecurity is only one part of business continuity planning, but it’s perhaps the most obvious. It’s concerning that fewer businesses are spending money to protect themselves from cyber threats.
But as we’ve seen, business continuity and cost-effectiveness are by no means mutually exclusive concepts. Investing in more resilient connectivity almost certainly represents a cost saving in the long run. Cloud based services are a business continuity measure that pretty much pay for themselves.
In other words, protecting your business is essential, but it shouldn’t cost the Earth. The right tools can create better businesses that are also better equipped for disaster.
Contact Everything Voice
For more information on future-proofing your business communications, please contact Everything Voice. We would be happy to help. Simply book a call, fill in an enquiry form, or chat with us now online.