The COVID-19 Pandemic Shines the Spotlight on Business Continuity Planning

This isn’t the typical hurricane season. Organizations that are already grappling with the sudden transition to remote work strategies now have the added worry that a tropical storm could put even more pressure on their operations.

COVID-19 Hurricane Season

IT teams recognize that their organizations might not survive a downtime event in today’s business and economic environment. That’s why it’s more important than ever to clearly understand the threats to your organization and develop a business continuity strategy that supports operational change. 

 

Changing Priorities

The first step is to conduct an inventory of all:

  • Systems
  • Applications
  • Data
  • Personnel
  • IT resources

Then identify the stakeholders associated with those resources. Consulting with stakeholders is critical as it helps you prioritize resources that are business-critical.

A risk assessment and business impact assessment can help you understand the threats to your business, the likelihood that a particular threat will occur and the potential effect on your operations. Again, risks and their business impacts may have changed. For example, if employees are working from home, you may be able to deemphasize procedures for setting up offsite work facilities. However, your WAN may be more important than ever, creating the need for redundant connectivity with automated failover.

Organizations might not survive a downtime event in today’s business and economic environment.

Backup isn’t the same as disaster recovery, but data protection remains an essential part of any business continuity plan. The data on any system or device is much more valuable than the technology itself, so you need to ensure that it is backed up regularly and can be restored quickly in the event of disaster. Cloud-based storage enables you to replicate data to an offsite location without purchasing and maintaining equipment.

 

How GDS Can Help

In a previous post, we discussed the GDS Geodiverse Secure Backup solution, which provides enterprise-class backup with replication to the cloud for robust data protection. The solution includes professional implementation, real-time monitoring and management, reporting, and upgrades and configuration changes.

GDS can also help you implement a strategy for restoring mission-critical applications and data with little or no disruption to business operations. Let’s sit down and go over your company’s business requirements, IT infrastructure and backup processes so we can help you develop a plan that minimizes the downtime, cost and impact of a disaster.

 

 

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