When disaster strikes, it’s how you recover that shapes the outcome.
Do you crack under the pressure? Do you have the resilience to bounce back? In business, there are myriad variables at play capable of influencing the answers. Not everything can be controlled; some crises are simply insurmountable. However, in a digital age in which virtually every process from communication to commerce depends upon technology, an inability to reboot fast is a risk which must be mitigated.
For Managed Service Providers in particular – many of whom supply customers with multiple solutions with multiple complexities and therefore multiple vulnerabilities – a means of delivering business continuity when disaster hits is critical.
In-house capability to do so is prohibitively-expensive for most: constant, 24/7 readiness for a rare event a luxury that is hard to justify.
Instead, outsourcing is the answer – partnering with a professional services organisation that has the expertise and the experience to not only rescue a business in crisis but also to ensure a quiet, year-round preparedness for any unforeseen emergency.
Picking the right partner is as important as it gets.
“There are many aspects to maximising protection against events capable of harming a business, from deploying secure privacy protocols to robust cybersecurity measures – business continuity should be right up there with them, but often gets missed,” says Ken McGuinness, Head of Business Continuity at ISO-compliant unified communications professional services practice Allendevaux & Company, which helps protect enterprises all over the world.
“Not that long ago, unified communication capability wasn’t considered critical in the delivery of products and services because there was always a work-around in the event of an outage. If you couldn't e-mail somebody, you could walk down the corridor and talk to them. Now, with the globalisation of systems and data, UC is business-critical. Those smart, integrated systems bring huge benefits but when one part goes down, the whole thing can grind to a halt.”
Prior to systems having the complexity they do today, many enterprises’ business continuity strategy was to simply have a second, identical system sitting in the background, just in case. That is now too costly.
Instead, there must be smart, lean, and agile contingencies that can be spun up rapidly: data backup and retrieval; communication network failovers; ransom negotiation; human resource management; and the right public relations approach.
