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Ensuring Business Continuity in Disruptive Times

A good business continuity plan effectively simplifies the process for IT to restore and maintain service for an organization in unforeseen circumstances.

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CIOL Bureau
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Ensuring Business Continuity in Disruptive Times

Every organization is faced with the possibility of disruptions, from planned events such as office relocations and IT maintenance, to unplanned emergencies that strike without a warning such as floods, epidemics or the threat of a pandemic. Even the minutest of regional incidents from water or power outages to commute disruptions can have a major impact.

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The most recent COVID-19, referred to by many as “the coronavirus”, is impacting people globally and has affected just over lakhs of people directly and millions indirectly. Companies are beginning to give serious consideration on how to give employees greater control over their wellbeing during this and other crisis-like scenarios, through remote working opportunities and the adoption of technologies that enable seamless collaboration.

While business continuity planning has traditionally focused on planning failover and high availability of mission-critical business systems, this is only part of the picture. To keep the business up and running, organizations must seriously consider a more comprehensive approach involving both organizational measures and technologies to curtail disruption, maintain a layer of security, and support uninterrupted productivity for all employees.

Why is business continuity so important?

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Companies today are faced with an unprecedented number of exposures. The reliance on a complex network of technology and supply chains is expanding due to an increase in the frequency and severity of weather-related events/disasters. Business disruptions that aren’t managed effectively come at a high cost, whether planned or unplanned. Businesses are then left susceptible to a variety of emerging and existing risks because of this.

Developing a business continuity strategy to manage such risks is key to the survival of any organization. Accelerating processes, helping IT restore and maintain service to the organization while getting people back to work as quickly as possible, are some of the crucial things that an effective business continuity plan will simplify.

Business Continuity Planning

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A good business continuity plan effectively simplifies the process for IT to restore and maintain service for an organization in unforeseen circumstances. At a high level, this plan should identify potential business disruptions that can affect any of an organization’s locations, such as power outages, epidemics, pandemics, and fires, as well as those that are location-specific, such as earthquakes and tsunamis in a seismically active region or civil unrest in politically unstable areas.

Planning extends throughout the supply chain as well, including reviewing the business continuity strategies for key vendors, identifying potential risks of operational outages, and evaluating alternatives. Planning should be based on worst-case scenarios, rather than multiple graduated versions of each incident, to keep the number of scenarios manageable.

In an emergency, it won’t always be possible to maintain normal operations. To alleviate the impact of reduced capacity, the team should identify which operations are most essential, who will perform them, and how work will be redirected if necessary.

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Embrace digital workspace tools to remain agile

Digital transformation is crucial for businesses to impact enterprise productivity and employee well-being. Digital tools help companies to be more productive, collaborate better, enable higher employee well-being quotient, and employee engagement. While answering the need for more work flexibility, developing a digital workplace is also instrumental in exploring new ways of working around the enterprise.

As remote work is on the rise and firms are also globalizing, cloud collaboration tools are becoming more widespread than ever. In severe cases, leaders should put employees’ health first, which sometimes means taking radical measures to limit in-office work and encouraging remote work. With safe access to their work tools from anywhere, digital tools let employees stay agile and productive; whether they’re working from home or the office.

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Prepare for the Worst and Deliver Best

As they say - “Change is the only constant”, this fits well for businesses too. The speed at which the changes are hitting enterprises though is faster than ever before. With COVID-19 clearly taking a toll on the global economy, productivity is lagging especially since companies have put travel restrictions in place and workers in affected areas remain quarantined. Most enterprise problems that we are facing because of this disruption are serious and need immediate attention but with digital workspaces, we can overcome those.

Creating flexible environments that provide employees with everything they need to be and perform at their best and adopting digital workspace solutions, can not only help companies keep pace but quickly move ahead as well. Companies empowering people to work in an intelligent, flexible and secure way, will not only unlock their creativity and innovation but also enable businesses to maintain continuity and deliver better results, even in adverse times.

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Hence, with some of the elements listed above, an organization can assess damage quickly, weather the crisis and recover as soon as possible. It is also essential to comprehend that a business continuity plan is an on-going process that must be updated regularly as the organization adopts to newer technologies and processes.

While tech companies already have their tasks cut out for them in these testing times, having an efficient business continuity plan in place will not only help companies empower their employees and maintain their employee engagement but also continue to deliver the best for their customers.

Ravindra Kelkar - Area Vice President, Sales & Services, Indian Sub-continent, Citrix