Benefits from Business Continuity Planning You Might Not Expect

It’s hard to dispute the value of a good business continuity plan. Given the high rate of business failure after a major disaster and the reasonable cost for modern technologies, a good business continuity plan is something every company should consider.

Having a business continuity in place has benefits that go beyond quick recovery from major disasters. It’s worth considering in your risk vs cost calculations when deciding to implement one.

One of the ways your company can prepare to recover from downtime (crashed servers) is to have a virtualized environment and image backups. But there are benefits to a virtualized environment that go beyond recovery. It’s easy to create new virtual machines, so deploying a new server to try out new technology is much easier. Virtualized environments take less space, cooling, and power than paying for server farms. Preparing for disaster in this way will save you time and money, even before a disaster happens!

To be more effective, document your continuity plans to restore functionality in your business systems. Don’t forget to be concise when documenting your systems. This plan must document who’s responsible for specific information and responsibilities. Having this type of documentation enables rapid planning for environment upgrades, refreshes, and maintenance. Once again, your business continuity plan is saving you money even when there is no disaster at hand.

We know the goal for business continuity is to recover business operations after a catastrophic failure. But why should it take a disaster to test your solutions? Battle-test your plan with any interruptions that occur. It’s these tests that will shape your continuity plan further. For example, if your Network Attached Storage (NAS) device was under maintenance, take the time to test your secondary backup solutions. Use these chances to again refocus and hone your process to save local files and image backups. Little disasters are usually low in impact, but they happen more often. This is another benefit to a company having a good business continuity plan in place.

The bottom line is, you’ve worked hard to build up your business and you’ll want to protect it. Modern technology enables these plans for implementation at lower costs than ever before. The disaster-resistant business will gain some cost savings and efficiency along the way! Clare Computer Solutions helps businesses like yours to see the value in such a process. Contact us today to get started.