Business Continuity is Critical These Days

March 31st is World Backup Day, which makes it the ideal opportunity to share the benefits of having a comprehensive backup plan. Alas, the current COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant business interruptions make World Backup Day only too timely this year. Below we'll examine how these tough times make a business continuity strategy and data backup all the more critical to have.

What is a Business Disaster?

Technically speaking, a lot of different things could fall under the term “disaster.” A business disaster could include any event that creates a disruption to that business’ processes, so it isn’t too generous to include the COVID-19 outbreak and its impacts in the list. Nonetheless, it would be irresponsible to pretend that the other potential problems that could impact your business become a non-issue just because the focus has shifted to the illness currently dominating the public awareness.

Other than the current pandemic, the term “disaster” covers:

• Natural disasters, like:
  • Fires
  • Floods
  • Storms
  • Earthquakes
  • Tornadoes
  • Blizzards
    
    
• Criminal acts, like
  • Hacking
  • Ransomware
  • Hardware theft
  • Sabotage
• Human error, like:
  • Deleted data
  • Unauthorized shutdowns
  • Unsaved files
  • Lost/damaged devices

Anything that causes data loss should be seen as some degree of disaster, so your backup and business continuity strategies become that much more important.

What is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is basically what it says on the box: the ability your business has to continue an acceptable level of its operations, despite some kind of obstacle. In the case of coronavirus, your organization's ability to continue its operations, despite your workforce preventatively isolating themselves or being under quarantine from the coronavirus.

While this is the type of situation that might not obviously require a backup, a backup is always a useful thing to have.

For example, one implementation that can significantly help your business continuity would be the capability for your team to work remotely. That way, even if they were stuck in their house, they could still serve a useful function to the business. While there are many ways to accomplish this, we always recommend that your business adopts the cloud.

Why? Simple--not only does the cloud allow for convenient and secure access to data from any authorized device, a cloud that is hosted offsite can inherently protect your data from a variety of those other threats listed above. As a result, if any of the above circumstances were to fall upon your business’ location, your business as an entity could continue with a few additional measures in place.

Remember, while there may be a global health crisis going on at the moment, there’s no guarantee that something else won’t impact your business as well.

To learn more about how you can help protect one of your business’ most important assets in disasters of every shape and size, give Macro Systems a call at 703-359-9211.