It’s true, we see one snowflake and we’re all thinking of hot chocolates at home and a snow day. Well, most employees are anyway. But for business owners it can mean panic stations and the worry of some serious downtime. This can lead to loss of productivity and in some cases loss of business. Companies need to have a business continuity plan in place all year round, not just when a particularly bad storm hits. But how can they do this?
1. BYOD Policy
If for some reason the offices are inaccessible and it’s not safe for staff to come in, having a BYOD policy in your business continuity plan is crucial. It gives your employees the freedom to use their personal devices all year round. As a result, if anything happened, they can access applications, emails and documents all from the comfort of their own home. It’s worth noting that the BYOD suite you choose should have complete security across all levels.
Having this set up means that when the snow or rain hits hard, you can simply ask your team to work from home. Make sure the BYOD policy is included in your employment contracts. Therefore staff are aware that should the office not be able to open, they will be expected to work from home.
2. IP Telephone Systems
You wake up one morning and thick snow has appeared. No one can get into the office to even turn the phones onto divert. What do you do? Hastily throw something out on social media providing you have remote access? Keep your fingers crossed and hope that most of your clients have been hit too? Or do you call your provider and ask them to redirect calls to the designated numbers?
IP telephony solutions allow your business to become more agile. It also means that if the lines ever become unavailable, even if it is due to something a bit more technical and not just bad weather, your provider can just press the divert button and voila.
3. Backup and Disaster Recovery
This is another plan that works all year round and covers a variety of situations; fire, flooding, theft, IT system failures and more. Having a solid backup system and a disaster recovery plan in place means that if something happens to your premises, your data can be restored from a single management console. It also helps to have off-site backups so they can be easily accessed if the office is damaged!
Here at CSG, we specialise in developing realistic business continuity plans that ensure the effective management, monitoring and automation of your systems back up along with providing off site replication at our data centres.