It’s an important question. In the early days and weeks of the pandemic, businesses with flexible IT infrastructure were able to smoothly transition to new ways of working. Those with more rigid systems struggled.
And business continuity planning isn’t just about once-in-a-lifetime pandemics or devastating but rare one-off occurrences like fires. Anything that disrupts your ability to operate constitutes a business continuity issue. That can mean extreme weather, cybercrime, economic instability or even just a particularly virulent flu season.
In other words, businesses should plan for the inevitability of disruption, because it will happen at some time or other. A business continuity plan is a holistic document that details everything from the personal contact details of important members of staff to the essential ingredients that make up a resilient business. But at the heart of any good contingency plan is the agility of your IT infrastructure.
Don’t take resilience for granted
What does agility mean when it comes to your systems and servers? It’s probably best explained by way of a common example.
Communications systems that are based on a traditional on-premise PBX are tried and trusted technology. But as an IT system deployment, they do little to help your business continuity planning.
A PBX system needs to be housed, protected and maintained, which can be costly in terms of both maintenance contracts and IT staff hours. It’s also vulnerable to a range of threats, including fire, flood, theft and vandalism. As the pandemic showed, if IT staff can’t get into the office, on-premise equipment can’t be maintained.
So if an on-site PBX powers your voice and unified communications, anything that disrupts its operation threatens your ability to operate as a business.
And it’s the same with the on-premise server that houses your essential data. How do you keep it safe from both physical threats and virtual ones, in the form of cybercriminals? For most smaller organisations, the answer is that they trust to the bare minimum in terms of physical protection and cybersecurity, and keep their fingers crossed. A third of small businesses, for example, have no cybersecurity strategy in place.
Technology deployment can create resilience
Compare that to a system hosted in the public cloud. No security is foolproof, but public cloud providers with reputations to protect tend to err heavily on the side of caution, investing huge sums in the latest physical and virtual protections for their data centres. They also store data in more than one location.
And of course, cloud-based services also help your business continuity planning in another way. They make you agile. Businesses that can work from anywhere are far more resilient than those that are tied to a single physical location. Put it this way, if your office was hit by a meteorite tonight, could your team be set up and working in the local coffee shop tomorrow morning, with access to all their usual communication and collaboration tools?
If the answer is yes, you’re not just ready for a meteorite strike, which is admittedly quite unlikely. You’re ready for extreme weather, awful traffic conditions, cyber attack and a clumsy contractor taking out your internet line, along with a host of other things that would otherwise disrupt your ability to operate efficiently.
Cloud communications – for good times and bad
Cloud solutions like unified communications are really a win-win for most businesses. They offer the agility that comes from being able to work anywhere. They’re also easy to scale (add users in a couple of clicks) and come with softphone apps that mean they’re available on laptops and smartphones as well as dedicated handsets. Good cloud-based communications offer everything employees need to communicate and collaborate professionally and effectively in one easy-to-use package.
In other words, cloud communications help your employees to be productive and efficient wherever they are, under any circumstances. And like all good technology deployments, they help your business to be better in both good times and bad.