Business Continuity: A Tool for Business Growth

Business has always seen data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity as a necessary evil. A cost for doing business but a cost which provides no real return on investment.

While this may have been true during the last century when organisations were not so reliant on their IT systems, times have changed. Being online today is crucial for conducting business. Customers interact with you via online applications, your staff’s productivity is directly related to the uptime of your internal systems and your business partners have created portals for closer collaboration and joint success.

Any form of downtime has a detrimental effect on your business and extended downtime could put your entire business’s survival in jeopardy. In addition, the potential threats which could cause downtime are growing each day. The traditional threats of hardware, network or communication failures along with natural disasters still exist and account for the majority of downtime incidents.

However, the online world with all the business benefits it has created has also given rise to a torrent of new business threats ranging from malicious hackers who are actively looking to take down your network, to ransomware which is ready to encrypt your files and take you offline until you pay the extortionist.

The fact is you need backups, disaster recovery and business continuity to protect your business but how do you turn this cost into a competitive advantage which can drive business growth? Let’s look at a few business continuity benefits that drive business growth.

A well-defined and properly implemented business continuity plan supports business momentum by ensuring systems stay up, online and functional despite unplanned incidents which could take them offline.

Uninterrupted business is a key measure for sustained business growth as it ensures there is no break in the momentum which builds up in an operational business over time. For example, let’s take a key business channel that creates business growth, the sales process.

The sales process starts with leads which are then turned into opportunities and finally developed into customers. The golden thread that weaves this process together is the trust which grows as the two parties walk the process together. Potential customers need to trust the organisation they intend to do business with and the sales process is the tool which builds this. Any form of instability which results in a prolonged break in the process may erode trust and could ultimately lead to the sale being lost.

Business is built on trust and trust is built on confidence. Any successful business will tell you that growth is built on happy customers and happy staff. To create this environment, customers and staff must have confidence in the stability of the organisation they are engaged with. Uninterrupted business continuity creates the confidence that is needed by stakeholders to ensure sustainable business growth.

Business continuity builds customer confidence and is of particular appeal to customers operating in regulated, compliance-driven industries.

Any business transaction carries some form of risk for both parties. Customers need to have the confidence in your organisation’s ability to deliver the product or service they need as their business may be dependent on it for their success. If customers perceive instability due to the lack of business continuity, they may look to move their dependency to another organisation they perceive to be more stable. Furthermore, should you have stability in the eyes of the market, you have a competitive advantage over any competitors who are perceived to have instability issues.

In addition, your staff also need to have confidence in your business. Staff members depend on your organisation for their livelihood and as such have a personal vested interest in the organisation’s stability. If they perceive instability they could look to move elsewhere putting your organisation at risk of losing key human resources, a vital ingredient for business growth.

A business continuity plan is built by following a process which starts with analysing your business. This analysis helps businesses understand each of their services, the dependencies on these services, and which parts of the business generate the most revenue. Coincidentally, this is the identical information an organisation needs when it seeks to plan, develop and execute a plan for business growth.

Digital Sense offers Veeam Cloud Connect which gives you the ability to rapidly and securely backup your data to the Digital Sense Data Centre, without the cost and complexity of developing and sustaining an off-site business continuity environment.

By utilising this enterprise-grade cloud-based service, you can grow and secure your business cost-effectively with the support of business continuity professionals who can advise and guide you on the best way possible to achieve your objectives.

Ransomware has made the headlines on numerous occasions as the primary malicious threat facing organisational IT systems and its attacks can be severe. Find out how you can protect your data from such an attack in our article: Ransomware: Why Backup and Recovery is your Only Real Line of Defence.