This period in May marks ‘Business Continuity Awareness Week’. This is an event that serves to help organizations across the globe raise internal awareness of the importance of business continuity, its basic and essential best practices.
Business continuity is about having a plan to deal with difficult situations, so your organization can continue to function with as little disruption as possible.
The aim of the week also extends to embedding it within the organizational culture, according to Jim Burglin, VP Customer Experience at BackBox.
Digital Journal caught up with Burglin to understand his take on the significance of the week upon the business community.
Burglin begins by looking at the special focus for 2022, which is: “’Building Resilience in the Hybrid World.’ That is the theme of this year’s Business Continuity Awareness Week, and it could not be more relevant to the challenges and tribulations organizations are facing today.”
As to how this develops, Burglin notes: “The word “hybrid” can take on many meanings for businesses, including hybrid work models where employees have flexibility to be either remote, in office, or a mix of both; and hybrid IT environments incorporating both on-premises and cloud-based and multi-cloud network infrastructures. Both of these examples require careful planning and the right support tools to ensure business continuity in the event of a disruption.”
As to what businesses should do in order to prepare, Burglin recommends focus on safeguarding technology: “A clear place to start is with a clear, thorough plan for backup and recovery. Of course, regular backups should be occurring as part of second nature for IT teams, but human error, complex multi-vendor environments and competing priorities can easily introduce disruptions to this routine practice.”
Burglin also looks at what makes for best in class: “The gold standard for backup and restore planning includes collecting a complete inventory of all applications, software and hardware; outlining specific individual responsibilities in the event of an outage and ensuring they each understand their responsibilities; ensuring access to alternative forms of communication; and regularly running exercises and revising the plan as needed.”
In particular, Burglin recommends: “Network automation platforms that streamline backup verification and automated disaster recovery into a single process without the chance of human error significantly assist organizations in protecting valuable data stored within their IT environments. Automating these processes helps IT teams ensure high availability resilience by creating a central backup of network device configurations with one-click recovery.”
There are other advantages, according to Burglin: “This approach also ensures that anyone the company authorizes – no matter where they are working from in today’s hybrid business model, or their level of experience – can “push the button” so there is no unnecessary delay in starting recovery efforts. Since Gartner estimates network downtime causes an average loss of $300,000 per hour, there is no time to lose in the event of a disaster.” Burglin’s final words of advice are: “Organizations looking to build resilience in their business continuity efforts must prioritize best practice backup hygiene and streamline the restore process to minimize downtime.”
