Businesses looking to improve their IT strategy — and increase profitability — should take a deep look into business continuity plans. While it sounds pretty mundane and nondescript, business continuity is a vital element of a strong IT strategy, as it involves everything your business needs to make sure it can quickly resume operations after a system failure, disaster, or other disruption.
What’s Involved in a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan should be implemented to quickly restore business functions, should anything adverse happen to your company’s operating system or data. At its essence, a business continuity plan — and any backup and disaster recovery vendor — should help you resume business operations, or maintain business continuity, with as little downtime and financial losses as possible. These protective IT features should include:
- Hybrid Cloud Backup Solutions
- Instant Local Virtualization
- Proof of Backup
- Off-Site Virtualization
- Off-Site Sync Methods to Manage Bandwidth
- Multiple Data Centers, in Geographically Diverse Locations
- Flexible Contracts and IT Upgrades
- U.S. Based Technical Support
5 Ways Business Continuity Improves Profitability
IT solutions, especially those that protect against something you hope (or assume) will never happen to your business, can sound costly. The important thing to remember, however, is that system failure can happen to anyone or any business, and the cost of such an IT disaster can greatly outweigh the cost of a preventative business continuity solution. Plus, there are five ways a business continuity plan can actually improve profitability, including:
- Lower Your Insurance Premiums
By reducing the cost of business risk capital — and improving your company’s risk practices — you can actually lower your commercial insurance premiums. For further details, be sure to talk to your insurance company.
- Leverage Process Engineering
Process engineering, a vital part of your business continuity planning, can help you deconstruct your process to understand your business’s underlying risks, but it can also reveal any opportunities for greater cost savings and efficiencies. Greater IT efficiencies can equate to lower labor costs and better time management, which ultimately means you spend more time with your clients and less time managing IT.
- Protective Systems Enable Growth
Business continuity systems enable businesses to scale and grow — because they’re protected from disaster and downtime! A great business continuity plan streamlines your business processes, working in the background (kind of like “auto-pilot”), to create consistent, reproducible results that help reduce risks and enable your business to grow. With Integracon’s IT help, these protective IT systems are set and start working — even when you aren’t — to backup and protect your data. As the business owner, this peace of mind means you’re able to grow and protect your business, no matter where your data lives.
- Become a More Competitive Supplier
Did you know that you can leverage business continuity to increase revenue? In fact, enterprises explicitly consider a vendor’s business continuity measures, governments ask small businesses to self-certify that they’re prepared for disasters, and prepared businesses are more likely to win contract awards! When your company is effectively prepared for the worst-case scenario, consumer confidence rises, which in turn, helps you grow! Think about it: when you can recover in as little as 6 seconds, customers see dependability knowing their data is always safe. When you protect your business, you protect your customers.
- Enhance Your Brand in the Community
As discussed previously, a business continuity plan shows and tells customers, enterprises, the government, and others that you’re not only dependable, but you’re prepared to handle and recover from IT disasters. While word-of-mouth praises, such as these, can build your brand within the community, there are other ways you can position your business as a caring, competitive, and prepared employer: by supporting your community in its time of need. In the case of a community disaster, your company (known for its preparedness) can help (in whichever way needed or able) to enable community renewal and rebuilding by reducing needless demands on first responders or other public resources. In turn, this can enhance your brand’s image within the community (and beyond).
Initiate an IT Preparedness Plan
IT business continuity plans go beyond simple data backups by ensuring that businesses are able to quickly resume operations after a system failure. Because of these varied factors, a dependable business continuity plan is most effective when implemented and monitored by a backup and disaster recovery vendor such as Integracon. Not only do we remove your IT burden, but we meet the requirements of this business continuity checklist, including the verification of data backups. If a business continuity plan still sounds unnecessary or not worthy of the cost, try to think of your business a living entity and business continuity as a preventative healthcare exam, where preventative action or education is implemented in the exam to prevent or find issues before they become unmanageable or fatal to the business.
If you’re ready to implement a business continuity solution, whether to protect your assets or to improve your business’s profitability, contact Integracon at 1-865-330-2323.
