There are many topics that businesses love to talk about in the boardroom. Whether it is the exciting new product launch coming up, or the marketing campaign that will fill the industry with excitement, or shooting the breeze about sales wins and achievements, we all love to focus on the positive stuff.
Straight-forward business plans make for simple conversations – everybody can see the plan and how reality is tracking to the plan. But what happens when something unexpected comes along? Something so unexpected that it means the business has to shut down for a few days? Can your business survive if the lights were turned off?
The what-if scenarios are the toughest to plan for, and for the CFO, can be a tough expense to justify. Why should we spend money on something we may never use? This may be a good question but the question should be, can we afford to shut our business down for hours, days or even weeks?
Every now and then mother nature comes along to remind us that we should be prepared for disruption, and Hurricane Sandy was a perfect example. One of the world’s biggest hubs, New York city was turned upside down as many businesses were without power for days. For a lot of businesses that meant riding out the storm and waiting for calm (and electricity) to be restored before re-opening. While others that had prepared for the worst and invested in business continuity plans, avoided downtime and lost revenue.
In the age of cloud resources, does your company have any excuse to be affected through a disaster situation? Are you really prepared?
This week Forbes Magazine contributor Dan Simon reflected on the eight business lessons that their publishing group learned from Hurricane Sandy. On his list, just behind “assume the absolute worst” and “think creatively” was “we need more cloud”.
A less visible and sometimes ignored advantage of cloud is the built-in resiliency capabilities through disaster recovery and business continuity plan features. Last year’s Queensland floods and cyclones made businesses in Australia aware of the risks a major disruption to their contact centres and the need for a business continuity plan to ensure a business stays operational in the event of a major disruption to operations.
Having a live disaster recovery solution built in to your cloud contact centre operations that can be up and running within minutes causing little disruption is invaluable. When time is money, no business can afford to be left in the dark, even when the lights may have gone off.
Click here to read one of ipSCAPE’s live disaster recovery case studies.