Everything you need to know to survive and thrive in difficult circumstances
Bad things happen to even the best organisations. Resilient businesses and charities accept that something will go wrong eventually, and that whatever it is might seriously undermine their ability to operate. They accept it, plan for it, and put the processes in place to make sure it does the least possible damage and lasts the shortest possible time.
And that, in a nutshell, is business continuity planning.
So does your business, charity or nonprofit need a business continuity plan? The simple answer is that every organisation needs one. As we’ve all seen with the Covid pandemic, threats to your operations can appear out of nowhere. Being hit by a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis might be considered bad luck, but disasters come in all shapes and sizes. Floods and fires are becoming more common as the world heats up. Theft and vandalism are ever present threats.
Any organisation is only as secure as its weakest link, and there are lots of potential weak links. That’s never more true than when talking about cybersecurity. It’s perfectly possible that one day you will be frozen out of your entire network because of an intern’s ill-advised link click. A good business continuity plan has to include the possibility – or perhaps we should say the inevitability – of a data breach.
As all that suggests, business continuity isn’t just about planning for natural disasters. It’s about preparing for anything that results in a significant disruption of your business operation. That could certainly mean a fire in your headquarters. But it could also mean an internet outage, an outbreak of seasonal flu that clears the office or a hurricane in the South China Sea that delays the shipping of vital components.
Can you stop these things from happening? Not usually. But you can prepare for them and put contingencies in place that allow you to keep going until the emergency is over. It’s essential that you do. To take just one example, recent statistics show that every hour of unplanned IT downtime costs businesses over $100,000 (£72,000). Now think of all the natural disasters and manmade accidents that might cause your IT infrastructure to be unexpectedly unavailable for an hour or two.
For charities and nonprofits, the direct financial penalty is likely to be lower than for business, but losing your ability to provide services or raise funds online would still be a significant blow.
So, if business continuity planning is essential, what should it entail? Very basically, it should include details on communicating with customers and suppliers during any emergency, and contingency plans for keeping core operations going. It would identify the teams and individuals with specific responsibility for continuity in different areas of the business.
Perhaps most crucially, it should include disaster recovery planning, which details your business-critical technological solutions and how to keep them running – or quickly get them back online – when disaster strikes. We’ll cover disaster recovery in more depth in the following sections.
Operational reliability
Operational resilience is at the heart of any business continuity plan. Keeping core operations going, or getting them up and running again as quickly as possible, can mean the difference between surviving an emergency relatively unscathed and suffering potentially catastrophic losses.
The resilience of your network solutions is a key consideration here, but how to improve network reliability? 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 important.
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?
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.
There’s also huge benefit in terms of operational resilience to hosting your most critical applications in the cloud. Cloud-based communications and collaborations tools, for instance, let your teams work efficiently together wherever they happen to be working from.
Good solutions will also mirror data and applications in dispersed geographies, so that a natural disaster that takes out one data centre won’t affect your ability to keep working.
Efficiency and productivity
The priority during any emergency situation is to keep everybody safe, and keep the organisation afloat. Ensuring that core operations can continue is the foundation stone of your business continuity planning.
But many contingency plans assume an emergency situation is a short, sharp shock. Flood waters subside, fires are dowsed and cysecurity emergencies are dealt with. Soon, the danger has passed and everyone goes back to normal.
It isn’t always that simple. As the pandemic has shown, an emergency response can sometimes morph into a long-term expedient. If a flood or fire puts your headquarters out of action, you may be dealing with the fallout for months rather than days or weeks.
In which case, continued business efficiency becomes a priority. In essence, the question you have to ask is: can the organisation not only operate, but operate efficiently (and, if you’re a business, profitably) during an extended period of adversity?
It’s a fundamental question, because climate change, cybercrime and economic downturns may continually test organisational resilience. You not only want to survive in such circumstances, you want to thrive.
Again, resilient IT infrastructure will be crucial here. According to one survey, more than a third of SMBs have lost customers due to downtime. The most resilient firms are flexible, which means in this case that, should disaster strike one location, they can simply relocate to another and be up and running again. Cloud-based tools that equip remote and mobile workforces are the obvious solution here, alongside multiple dispersed data centres to house business-critical data and services.
Technology deployment
Put simply, your IT system deployment can either help or hinder your business continuity planning. Many businesses are moving away from on-premise infrastructure anyway, for purely commercial reasons. In the case of unified communications, for instance, services that are hosted in the cloud remove the need for organisations to house, protect and maintain hardware, freeing IT staff up for other tasks.
In business continuity terms, it’s the ‘protect’ bit that’s the issue. How do you protect the on-site PBX that facilitates your voice and unified communications from fire, flood, theft or vandalism? For that matter, how do you protect the on-premise server that houses your essential data from cybercrime? 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.
Compare that to a system hosted in the public cloud. No security is full proof, but public cloud providers with reputations to protect tend to err heavily on the side of caution, investing huge sums in the latest real and virtual protections for their data centres. They also store data in more than one location.
And, as we’ve seen, cloud-based systems are resilient for another reason. Companies with cloud communications found it far easier to transition to remote work than those with on-premise equivalents. Cloud services were made for mobile workforces, letting them work productively even if they have to bypass a compromised corporate network.
Cyber security
Cyber security threats were growing before the pandemic. Since Covid struck, the risk has become even greater. In one survey, 47% of IT and cybersecurity professionals say the number of genuine cybersecurity threats has increased ‘greatly’ or ‘somewhat’ since the start of the pandemic.
With the cumulative cost of data breaches running into millions of pounds, cyber security is clearly a business continuity issue. And it’s about compliance and reputation as much as money. Ticketmaster was fined well over £1 million last year for contravening GDPR regulations and failing to ensure the security of customer data. It will ride the fine, but suffer from plummeting customer trust.
Every organisation, however small, can and should follow basic cybersecurity essentials. Don’t click without thinking, use strong passwords and two-factor authentication, educate employees about phishing scams and so on.
And your cybersecurity framework should also govern the use of personal devices. In one report, organisations admitted that they are struggling to manage remote workers’ use of phones and other mobile devices. Remote employees may also adopt apps and services that haven’t been approved or security checked by IT, whether that’s a note taking app or a password manager. It’s worth putting rules around these practices in writing.
Business-grade cloud communications tools can help here, by offering remote and mobile employees a secure softphone app that gives them full unified communications without the need to bolt on third party consumer apps (often in less secure ‘freemium’ versions). For peace of mind, look for services hosted in secure ISO 27001 certified data centres.
Monitoring and feedback
For many organisations, network performance is a business continuity issue. A poorly performing network can mean core operations slowing down and even grinding to a halt. When your business, charity or nonprofit relies on being online, continual network analysis should be part of your business continuity framework.
What does network monitoring actually mean? A monitoring system tracks data along cables and through servers, switches, connections and routers. If that data encounters an obstacle, monitoring tools can identify the source of the problem, feedback and help you solve it.
That kind of system analysis helps you identify issues before they result in damaging downtime, or time consuming calls to the service desk. Keeping your core network in rude good health is one way to help ensure business continuity. In the event of an emergency, network analysis can help you pinpoint bottlenecked data and determine the remedial action that needs to be taken.
That kind of system analysis helps you identify issues before they result in damaging downtime, or time consuming calls to the service desk. Keeping your core network in rude good health is one way to help ensure business continuity. In the event of an emergency, network analysis can help you pinpoint bottlenecked data and determine the remedial action that needs to be taken.
Smaller organisations may not have the in-house expertise to monitor network performance, but in many cases a good network provider will offer monitoring and feedback as part of its service package. That will include checking for cybersecurity concerns as well as dips in performance.
Cost savings
There’s no greater cost saving than protecting your organisation from the worst effects of a natural disaster or cybersecurity emergency. And there’s a win-win here too. By analysing your IT infrastructure for the purposes of business continuity planning, you can also identify ways of reducing IT infrastructure costs.
We’ve seen already that cloud-based communication is inherently more resilient than on-premise equivalents, while also removing the need to update, manage and maintain expensive hardware. Pick the right cloud communications 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.
Cloud services are also much easier to scale, up and down. Add users in a couple of clicks, and remove them just as efficiently. Cloud communications mean you can slash equipment costs by simply equipping staff with the accompanying softphone app for use on smartphones and laptops.
There are other ways of reducing infrastructure costs while enhancing business continuity planning. For example, 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.
Conclusion
Business continuity isn’t a nice to have. The threats to your operations are real and current, and in many cases growing. While the Covid pandemic may eventually fade into memory, risks associated with climate change and cyber crime are not going anywhere.
And as we’ve seen, business continuity has to take into account anything that results in a significant disruption to your business operation. The huge costs associated with internet downtime make it essential that you include disaster recovery (and keeping teams connected to each other and the internet) as part of your contingency plans.
Putting a basic strategy in place isn’t difficult, and can actually make your IT infrastructure both more efficient and more cost-effective. If you’d like to know how Future Voice can help equip your own organisation with the tools and services that underpin business continuity, please get in touch.
