Business Continuity is a broad church, meaning different things to different businesses. It’s also very much a people thing; after all, it exists to keep people in jobs, delivering to customers, whatever happens.
That said, we have recently been involved in designing and deploying a fair few technology implementation projects within our process and systems work.
What is clear is that over the past year, and probably in the forthcoming year, there are a number of technologies which have come of age, or are due to have some significant upgrades that should transform them.
On-Site Resiliency – Backups and DR Provision
If you’ve not looked recently at Windows Server 2008R2, specifically the new Windows Backup, and Hyper-V R2, then it’s worth doing so now. Ally these with USB3 data transfer speeds and the cheap price of gigabit networks now, and you can produce some very powerful business continuity solutions almost “from the stuff you have lying around”. It’s like when the A-Team used to build a tank, or digger or crane or assault weapon out of an old car and the contents of a farmer’s shed. Even better, no welding is involved, so the H&S risk assessment is easier!
I’ve been impressed at what we’ve been able to design and implement for some quite capital budget-constrained clients using a lot of what they already have. Solutions that just work away in the background, not getting in the way.
A Light Covering of Cloud Can Be Good
As a reseller of Microsoft’s Office365 online offerings, we at Critical Action are also getting quite excited about the possibilities of integrating these with on-premise systems to give an “immediate emergency response” platform – even for businesses that don’t necessarily want to store key data in the public cloud. This latter concern on where data is and who can access it under what circumstances probably stops a lot of businesses moving to the cloud even if other benefits stack up.
Way back in the past, we started the business leaning quite heavily on Google docs; but now I like Office365. It is now a more polished “version 2” and even the basic few-quid-a-month web Outlook and Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote flavour is functional and familiar enough to help in an emergency: you could coordinate key staff, access and print documents like emergency procedures, manage and produce public relations releases, track basic info, etc. You also have SharePoint online if you want to get a bit more advanced – as we do here at Critical Action; SharePoint is a favourite of ours.
As ever, we love to know how you are making the most of the tools you have in novel ways, delivering more for less.