By Wes Stillman, Chief Innovation Officer, Swizznet
Few things are more important than having a business continuity plan in place to guide your business through unexpected events. How would you respond to a cyberattack? What would you do in the case of a flood, a fire, or, as we’ve experienced in the past year, a global health crisis? The goal of a business continuity plan is to have a ready answer for how you will continue to operate and serve customers when unforeseen challenges come your way.
One of the crucial pieces of the business continuity puzzle is your technology stack. Business simply can’t go on without tools, tech, and apps running smoothly and without interruption. This is true for employees working on internal processes and for your ability to provide services to customers. If you take a look at your essential processes, functions, and services, which ones are vulnerable to an IT disruption?
Building cloud technology into your business continuity plan
If your mission-critical programs, software, and tools are on a local server or only accessible on a local computer, you’re out of luck if going into the office is no longer an option, your local server fails, or a cyberattack takes down your operations. It’s for this reason (among many others!) that cloud technology has taken off. Business resiliency is a built-in benefit, and it’s the ideal answer to our remote work, fast-paced, always-changing world.
Managing a remote workforce
Business has been evolving toward the cloud for some time and remote workforce are being the new normal for many companies. Swizznet is a fully remote company, and having cloud-based tools already in place allowed us to support our employees and navigate the unknowns of Covid-19 from the start with little interruption. We ramped up our use of communication tools like Zoom and Slack, and we were able to provide key services to our customers even without access to a central, physical location. Part of your business continuity plan going forward should include steps on how you will deploy tech that will empower a distributed workforce, whether by choice or by an unforeseen circumstance.
Improving cybersecurity
Cyberattacks continue to be on the rise, targeting everyone from the government and healthcare companies to small businesses. Phishing attacks are the main culprit and often result in serious financial losses. Oftentimes, smaller businesses managing their own security and IT don’t have access to the people and financial resources needed to defend against attacks. When working with providers of cloud tools, however, enterprise-grade technology typically inaccessible to small businesses is built in. No organization wants to fall victim to an attack for the reputational and financial costs as well as the disruption to business.
Improving connectivity and employee experience
Part of maintaining business continuity is making sure that employees can collaborate and sustain their productivity without physically interacting with one another. When everything employees need in the cloud, they have anytime, anywhere access to data, files, and essential information. Remote access to software and data should be a key part of your business continuity plan so everyone can keep working without missing a beat. Though remote access is possible through VPN, security issues abound and connectivity is often poor. Cloud services are quick and easy to access anywhere you have internet service. Employee productivity and satisfaction improves with fewer bottlenecks slowing them down.
Want to learn more about cloud technology and our other managed IT services? Email Swizznet or call (855) 959-0065.
Swizznet is a cloud-based hosting solutions company for small- and medium-sized businesses and is a Sage Partner Cloud Strategic Hosting Provider for the commercial real estate industry. We help construction and real estate firms help transition easier to the cloud by providing the tools, expertise and resources needed.
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