Every company has its challenges to improving continuity in the business. Mainly because there are a number of ways to do it for your organization, and it is a continuous and ongoing process.
The best definition I can give and the one I like the most for Business Continuity is from VMWare - "A business' level of readiness to maintain critical function after an emergency or disruption."
The basics still come into play, but we are going to do a deeper dive into some creative options here today. If you are just beginning you exploration in ways your business can do this, start with a recent article of mine discussing the basics and then come back to this one - https://www.alucidsolutions.com/post/backup-recovery
Exploring options of Business Continuity need to be in alignment with the overall business objectives, not just IT's. As an IT professional, it's pertinent to understand what 'Business Continuity' means to the organization and the executive(s) you are working alongside to improve or achieve it. Here are the most common 3 reasons for BC to be a priority to the Business:
Recent Downtime
Key Growth initiatives in the business
New regulation or compliance requirements
Recent Downtime
The most common issue that arises today is an experience with downtime or an outage that has negatively affected or threatened to negatively impact the organization and its clients. This could be phones losing service, internet going down, loss of power at the office, CRM system failing, billing system failure, warehouse technology not working properly, not having access to email, wireless internet not working, manufacturing system failure, and on and on.
Any application or tool that is used in the critical operations of a company to generate revenue or provide clients simple access to the information they need is a potential point of failure. Great technologists and operationalists will do whatever they can with what they have available to prevent that from happening, but it all comes down to the leaderships' appetite for risk and budget willingness to ensure uptime.
Key Growth Initiatives
Every business that is seeking to improve itself typically has a set of growth initiatives that require a need for improvement in operations. Whether you are working to obtain business from a Fortune 1000 organization, a new business partnership that is supporting your company, working to support an RFP of a current client, or just progressing in operations to support future business brand opportunities - growth initiatives are a significant reason for why companies are working on their business continuity strategy.
Working within the banking industry, there are two strong pulls for Business Continuity improvement, which include brand security/notoriety, as well as, compliancy. A simple example is, how would you feel walking up to your bank's ATM to find you not able to access any funds? Better yet, how would you feel walking into the bank to find that the Bank Teller system is down and the person is unable to fulfill a mortgage loan transaction? These are just small examples of how banks would need to improve business continuity to ensure current and future customers that it can grow into a successful community, regional, or national brand that you are willing to work with.
Our team having worked with large retailers, it is understood that even during peak holiday hours, we can go purchase any product from my retailer and not experience any resistance or friction in doing so. Today, the online marketplace of a business is even more pertinent as consumer traffic grows. Perhaps, you are waiting for Elton John's Farewell Tour concert tickets to go on sale and you await the very second it opens to go online to purchase them only to find that you are unable to checkout of your cart. So many other buyers had the same idea and somehow, no matter how hard you click your mouse or refresh your cart, you still cannot check-out to secure your purchase. Retailers had a rude awakening during the initial weeks of the 2020 Pandemic. First, no one being able to go in and operate the storefront. Then, too many online orders. Does it sound familiar - when you go online to order home supplies from @Target and @Costco to find that you cannot add any additional items to your shopping cart. You check to make sure they still have stock from the location you are picking from and retry adding the 2 lbs of bacon or gallon of milk?
In both cases, these business' cache servers are failing to keep up with the growing number of items being held in peoples' online shopping carts. Online Ticket merchants, having dealt with abnormal 'seasonal' ticket purchases know this all too well. Their solution = countdown timer in your cart. You have 3 minutes to purchase those tickets, otherwise they are gone. You thought it was because they wanted you to purchase the ticket now, immediately, or lose out on the show. While that may be a reason they have kept it, it all started because their cache servers could not support holding tickets in thousands of carts of people who have not made a purchase and are waiting to hear back from friends before checking out. Their systems would physically fail so that no one could make the purchases.
Regulation + Compliance
Banks, financial institutions, healthcare, and a number of other businesses are under the constant gaze of audit groups and regulation. It can be quite painstaking to determine what is best for my business and how I can improve upon what I have. Today, however, we have regulatory bodies that inject themselves in such a way that it has become challenging to support a continuously changing infrastructure. These pressures have only accelerated regulatory standards for banks as they grow as a business and capture additional assets that they manage, forcing business continuity improvements as apart of their quarterly and annual audits ($1, $3, $10, and $20 billion in assets under management are common benchmarks for increased compliance requirements).
Being a bank, there is inherent trust that is required for someone to do business and store their money with you. On top of that, there are numerous federal regulatory policies now in place to protect customer's finances and personal information. Whole agencies exist solely to ensure citizens of the United States are protected. In order for growth, these policies take shape in form of operational improvement specifically for business continuity. Every conceivable disaster scenario is outlined alongside the measures taken to prevent such scenario, its appropriate response, and operating procedures to resolve. From individual system redundancies to fiber cuts in the ground.
Thankfully, there are organisations today that are dedicated to not only providing solutions that exist, but coming up with new creative solutions for business to achieve the continuity that is needed for their customers' long term success. It is important for businesses with growth initiatives to have the flexibility and awareness that these events can occur and there are, thankfully, numerous solutions today to quickly resolve them. From cloud based solutions to short term rentals of equipment, solutions are available to ensure uptime and business continuity.
This is a longer outline of a continued series on Business Continuity that will be released in various media formats over the coming months. To get updates or receive these directly, please sign up at the bottom of our main page, here - https://www.alucidsolutions.com/
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Image Credit: https://www.vazata.com/news/disaster-recovery-or-business-continuity-whats-the-difference/