People talking about business downtime is very common nowadays. World’s top-ranking business organizations has faced “Business Downtime” at least since their operation. The same is applicable to medium and startup companies. Hence it’s a must that organizations should follow a Business Continuity Plan to support business downtime.
Let’s take a quick look at the reasons for getting into downtime:
Hardware Failure – This physical equipment failure includes the following:
a. Network Outages
b. Server Failures
c. Storage Failures
d. Interconnecting equipment Failure
2. Software Failure – These accounts for the Logic control equipment failure.
a. Application Errors
3. Third-Party Suppliers or Cloud Outages
4. Power Failures
5. Human Error
6. Natural Calamity
7. Others
As we can now understand that all these are primary contributors to Business Downtime. So the question arises, how to take care of this situation and come out of it?
This is the time when a Business Continuity Plan comes into play. A business continuity plan is made to successfully and rapidly restore business functions so that nothing adverse happens to the company’s data and operating systems. An ideal Business Continuity Plan should focus on maintaining business continuity with minimum financial and downtime loss. Features that should be introduced to combat a business downtime:
1. Hybrid Cloud Backup Solutions – A hybrid Cloud backup solution is achieved by combining on-premise NAS devices. On-premise NAS Device actually acts as local backup targets and has enough space to hold numerous, full backups and can execute background synchronization of the backup data to an external cloud service. This way a company can easily restore data from the recent past as the data is readily available on-site in the NAS and can be accessed quickly. Hybrid Backup has the power to overcome both the scaling issues of on-site backup systems and the latency issues of only-cloud backup solutions. Data backed up in Hybrid systems is directly replicated to the public cloud provider.
2. Maintaining multiple Data Centers throughout the globe in Geographically Diverse Locations.
3. Disaster proofing data backup – Organizations can beat all odds by designing such a backup plan that protects against worst-case scenarios. On the data storage front, having only one backup is not sufficient when it’s a matter of the survival of your business. An organization should adopt a 3-2-1 backup rule. It implies that whether you are a consumer or a company you should store data 3 times.
4. Continuous IT upgrades are a must. Together with this Flexible contracts and software licensing should be maintained.
5. Automate Business Processes such as Sales, Accounts, etc with the help of modern-day tools like Twib for “Sales Reporting Application”, Slack, Close.io, Hubspot, Chatbot, etc.
6. Off-Site Sync Methods should be adopted to Manage Bandwidth.
7. Periodic and systematic maintenance of the Hardware devices and interconnecting equipment such as cables, facilities, routers, etc.
8. Off-Site Virtualization plays an important role in minimizing loss at downtime.
Keeping all these features in mind will help to lower the loss factor during the Business Downtime. Implementing a proper business continuity plan can solve almost all the critical issues faced during business downtime.
