30 August 2021 – If the COVID pandemic has taught business owners anything, it’s that just when you think the worst has happened, things can escalate. Planning for the worst when you’re in unprecedented times can seem pretty daunting, but there are a few tried, tested and well-understood techniques that you can use, supported by technology, to ensure you’re agile enough to see out pretty much anything.
Says Euphoria Telecom CEO John Woollam, “It’s critical for businesses to make business continuity and disaster recovery plans if they hope to survive the worst happening.”
A Mecer study conducted at the beginning of the pandemic indicates that some 51% of companies globally do not have a business continuity plan, despite their proven efficiency at mitigating risks and helping businesses to survive disasters.
Explains Woollam: “Business continuity (BC) plans ensure that the business can keep going when something goes wrong – for example a fire, flood or cyber attack – while disaster recovery (DR) deals with recovering vital ICT systems and infrastructures following a disaster – natural or man-made. These disciplines are closely interlinked. For smaller businesses, these have both been made much simpler by the advent of managed cloud computing services.”
There are three big things you need to do take care of when it comes to BC&DR:
- Back it up – back up, back up and back up. If your IT systems are not cloud-based, you’re at risk if the physical hardware is destroyed or inaccessible. So if your email runs on a server in the corner of the office, or in a server room, or your employees have their emails downloaded to their laptops, it’s a risk. If everything is hosted on local hardware that is tied to and only accessible from a fixed location, it is at risk of being rendered inaccessible.
Keep regular backups of everything that is critical to running your business – from email to accounting to CRM and ERP systems. Schedule daily backups, and test them often. If you’re not sure what to back up, ask yourself what your business cannot survive without, and go from there. Ideally things should be backed up to the cloud but if you need physical backups make sure they are stored in a facility that is safe from floods, fires and the like.
- Take it to the cloud – managed cloud services offer businesses a host of technology solutions that will fit pretty much any needs and budget. From backups to storage to ERP, CRM, accounting, office productivity and even cloud-based telephony and call centre solutions, there is very little – technology-wise – that cannot be hosted in the cloud. What this means for BC&DR is that as long as you have an internet connection and a device, you and your teams can reach your systems and carry on working.
- Make sure it’s mobile – the weak point in this are your end user devices, if they’re not mobile. Desktop machines offer their advantages but they’re kinda hard to move around, and if you can’t get to them, or they’re destroyed, they may as well not exist. Equipping your teams with laptops and smartphones can mean the difference between keeping going or closing. If you’re big enough and need to have people in central, physical locations, investigate paying for access to a disaster recovery site to ensure you have what you need to keep trading.
About Euphoria Telecom
Euphoria Telecom is a leading provider of an innovative, cloud-based, cost effective, business telephone service that offers unprecedented control and automated operational efficiency. The solution offers any business a truly simple approach to managing communications across an increasingly decentralised and mobile workforce. Seamless integration and automation make it simple for businesses to access insights, reports and efficacy of communications.
The company has earned a reputation as a customer-centric business, decreasing customer telephony costs by up to 50% and maintaining excellent customer service. Established in 2010, the company now proudly hosts over 4 000 business customers in South Africa and continues to grow rapidly. The company was founded by George Golding, Conrad de Wet and Rafal Janik, and is managed by John Woollam and Nic Laschinger.
