The Role Your Communications System Plays in Disaster Recovery Planning
When something unexpected happens, a business needs to be able to adapt and move on quickly to keep from losing money, productivity, and reputation. This is why you need to plan for business continuity and disaster recovery. It’s something that every business, no matter how big or small, should do. Yet few actually do.
What would happen to your daily business if your server room flooded? What would you do if your building caught fire or lost power? What if your databases were stolen while you were sleeping, and you didn’t find out until the morning?
No one likes to think about bad things that might happen. We don’t like to bring up threats or focus on bad things in this way. However, it’s crucial that you understand the importance of having a disaster recovery plan in place, and it’s vital that you understand how big a role your communications will have in that plan. Read on to find out more.
Business Continuity
There is a distinction to be made between disaster recovery and business continuity. At its highest level, business continuity is the proactive process through which a business anticipates and prepares for as many potential threats to its operations as possible. All sorts of things fall into this category, from making regular cloud backups to making sure employees always have a second place to go in case of an emergency.
Your communications are critical at this point. You need to ensure you can maintain productivity, and it is your phone systems and other tools that will help you.
Disaster Recovery
Most disaster recovery plans centre on strengthening IT infrastructure. How a business can restore its hardware, software, and data after a disaster is the main focus. Comparative to a bird’s eye view of business continuity, this one is more focused on the nuts and bolts.
These are not contradictory possibilities. Disaster recovery is a key part of any reliable business continuity plan. Considering that few companies can function properly without some form of information technology, disaster recovery is frequently considered a subcategory of business continuity. It’s often best to get guidance from experts about disaster recovery planning in case of failure of IT and voice services in that case.
What Can You Do?
To protect your company, you must be prepared for any number of potential dangers. How personnel will continue to be productive, where they will work, how they will access the systems, and how everything will be coordinated and managed are all essential components of a solid business continuity and disaster recovery plan.
Of course, the specifics will vary from field to field, but the general idea is the same.
All this discussion about catastrophe recovery and business continuity planning sounds expensive, doesn’t it? Not so. Successful preparation does need an investment of time, however. In addition, you’ll need to put in the hours on a consistent basis to keep revising your strategies as your company develops. Investments may be necessary, but they won’t be as pricey as you might fear.
And there you have it – all you need to know about the surprisingly important role your communications system plays in disaster recovery planning.
