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Nothing like a global pandemic to show you the importance of making smart IT investments. With tighter budgets than usual, businesses are focused on spending carefully – and on tools that can keep the organization running smoothly despite disruptions. In other words, COVID-19 is showing us the value of business resilience.
What is Business Resilience?
Put simply, it’s a combination of proactive and reactive actions that help an organization quickly adapt to and mitigate threats and disruptions. Good business resilience tactics play a direct role in the success of the organization.
For the IT department specifically, business resilience includes more traditional things like cybersecurity, backup, and disaster recovery. But it also includes having an infrastructure that can scale up and down as needed, support remote employees, and include cloud and edge computing.
Going Beyond Traditional Measures
In the past, when people thought about business resiliency, they tended to focus on having a data center with high availability and disaster recovery – things that minimized the downtime of critical applications and data.
However, with COVID-19 in the picture, business resilience has expanded to include much more:
Work from Anywhere: Quickly and securely connect remote users to existing infrastructure
Cybersecurity: Actively protect your networks and data from attacks
Backup: Protect data – both to comply with regulations for long-term retention and to give an extra layer of recovery options in case of disaster
Scalability: Flexible infrastructure that can grow quickly as needed
Misconceptions About Business Resiliency
Misconception #1: I already have disaster recovery plans in place. That means I have business resiliency.
DR is an important part of business resilience, but it’s only one of the many parts that make up resiliency. Disasters and disruptions come in my forms. Even the best DR plans can’t prepare for every scenario. Also, your DR plan may be weaker than you realize if it isn’t tested regularly or is only known to one person on the team.
Misconception #2: I don’t have time for business resiliency.
The less prepared your organization is for a disruption, the greater your loss of business. And many organizations don’t just lose business – they never recover and close permanently. Building business resiliency is something you absolutely must make time for.
Misconception #3: My employees can work remotely just fine on a laptop with VPN.
Providing and managing multiple laptops is very costly and inefficient. In addition, traditional VPN connections can compromise your network (that you’ve worked so hard to protect) because they can make your network vulnerable to cyberattacks passed through your users’ home networks.
How Can I Achieve Business Resilience?
Start by selecting smart technology. Many of today’s businesses are choosing solutions such as:
Hyperconverged Infrastructure: This highly available, scalable infrastructure is easy to deploy and manage.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): These flexible desktops are more secure, more flexible, and easier to manage than VPN connections to laptops.
Ransomware Protection: A no brainer. You need this to actively monitor and prevent attacks that could cripple your IT systems.
Backup and DR with Cloud: Protect your data and workloads by sending them to the cloud for recovery and failover. This is a helpful solution for organization that don’t have a second physical site where they can send their backups.
Every organization needs business resiliency, but you might not be sure where to start. That’s ok. Our experienced pros can help you create a roadmap to resiliency and recommend cost-effective solutions to get you there.
