Floods, fires, theft, vandalism, pandemics and cyber attack. The number of threats to your core operations can sometimes appear never ending. And while a once-in-a-century health crisis might be dismissed as sheer bad luck, cyber criminals and extreme weather events represent clear and growing risks to every company’s ability to operate normally.
So what’s to be done? If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that agility is the future of business. Operational resilience in 2021 is about being able to switch to new working patterns at will, with no disruption to core departments. If the worst does happen, organisations also need the means to get basic business functions up and running again as quickly as possible.
Cloud is crucial here. Over half of UK businesses said cloud adoption has saved them during the Covid pandemic, with 60% now planning to substantially increase their use of cloud-based IT through the pandemic and beyond.
Cloud creates agility
There are very good reasons for that. Cloud-based unified communications, for example, are almost the dictionary definition of business agility. They allow employees to make and take professional business calls from anywhere and on any device, even if their office phones are floating away on a tide of flood water. All they need is a half decent internet connection.
Cloud-based unified communications also offer a full collaboration experience for staff who are geographically dispersed. Employees can meet, chat and solve problems using video, text, conferencing and more, while also sharing screens and working on the same documents at the same time.
It’s the next best thing to having everyone in the same room at the same time, without the commute. And it means your workforce can continue to work effectively and productively regardless of disruption to your business.
The foundations of business continuity
That’s certainly what thousands of businesses found during the Covid pandemic, and it’s what many more will discover when the more mundane shocks of modern business life – internet outages, cyber threats, traffic jams – force them to accept the necessity of agility. Then there’s the trend towards hybrid working, which allows employees to spend at least some of the week working from home, even in normal circumstances. Cloud-based communications facilitate new ways of working, in good times and bad.
The resilience of your network solutions is a foundation stone of business continuity, and cloud-based tools are inherently robust. A good cloud provider will mirror your data and services in a number of geographically dispersed locations, so if one data centre goes down, your services will just switch over to another. You can be back up and running in seconds.
But while cloud is important, any business continuity plan also needs to take connectivity into account. Connectivity is the foundation of most modern business activities, from communications and collaboration to sales and marketing, so implementing the most reliable solutions for your needs and budget is essential.
The bandwidth you need
In practice, that means having the bandwidth you need for operational reliability, both in normal circumstances and taking potential spikes in demand into account. For example, if your workforce has to quickly transition to home working, could your network handle the increased demand for cloud-based services employees would need to work productively?
So how do you improve network reliability to take any eventuality into account? As a general rule, the more fibre your connectivity solution contains, the more resilient it will be. Fibre is not only faster than copper-based connectivity, it’s also less likely to break or be affected by weather. Aim for full fibre connectivity if your budget allows. It’s the fastest and most robust connectivity solution currently available.
There’s also a case to be made for installing a private line. Again, your budget and business needs will dictate whether or not this is the right solution for you, but having a leased line can ensure that, during times of disruption when internet use is spiking, your data gets through.
Mobility for operational resilience
Of course, in some emergencies, you might not have access to fixed line connectivity at all. In which case, your operational resilience would be greatly enhanced by a mobile back-up solution. Business-grade mobile back-up connectivity is cost-effective and flexible, acting as a reliable failover whether the emergency is a devastating flood or temporary internet outage.
Mobile data can also act as the primary solution when you’re waiting for a leased line to be installed, or in remote areas where implementing fixed line connectivity is prohibitively expensive. Some sectors – construction, events – use mobile solutions to connect temporary sites. In a similar vein, a mobile solution would allow your business to continue if, for whatever reason, you had to move your office to temporary premises.
If business has got anything to thank the pandemic for, it’s a new focus on operational reliability. A crisis doesn’t have to be a rare event like a pandemic. Anything that disrupts your ability to operate is a business continuity issue. All organisations need to plan for the near-certainty of occasional but significant disruption, with the resilience and agility of your communications infrastructure high on the list of priorities.