Business Continuity Services

Why do you need Business Continuity Services?

Imagine your worst-case scenario. It could be an extreme weather event that hits with little or no warning and wipes out your entire computer network—along with everything stored on it. Or the organization’s third-party Internet service provider goes down, and stays down all day—right in the middle of a last-minute push to complete a mission-critical project. Or an inexperienced employee mistakenly presses the wrong button—and presto, years of invaluable sales and marketing data vanishes into the void forever.

For business owners and responsible managers, this is the stuff of nightmares. The only question is: What will you do about it? Will you continue to wake up screaming in the middle of the night? Or will you take the necessary steps to prevent that nightmare from becoming a reality?

What Is Business Continuity?

Simply put, “Business Continuity Services” is exactly what it sounds like: keeping business processes up and running in the midst of a crisis that would like nothing more than to shut them down. Permanently, if possible.

Put another way, it is no more and no less than an organization’s ultimate, worst-case-scenario disaster plan. Such business disasters (often referred to euphemistically as “unplanned incidents”) can take many forms. Some of the most common ones include:

• Internal Vulnerabilities
  People make mistakes. That’s a given and always has been. But no matter how well protected your network and business data, rest assured that human ignorance, inexperience, or simple carelessness will somehow, someday, find its one weak point and take down the whole structure.
Malicious Intent
You read about them in the news every day. Computer viruses. Trojan horses. Ransomware. Phishing scams. Massive data breaches. Even the biggest corporations are not immune to such cyber-attacks, which are bent on accessing an organization’s network and exposing, altering, disabling, stealing, or destroying its data. When successful, such attacks can bring that organization to its knees.
• Loss of Connectivity
  From crumbling castle walls to collapsing train trestles to exploding rockets, all of human history is full of examples of failed engineering. Nothing made by the hand of humanity has ever been perfect or permanent. Not only can it break, it will break, eventually. And that goes double for the hardware and software that run our digital networked world. ISPs sometimes go down, LANs get disabled, transmitted data becomes corrupted en route. Nowadays, most businesses require continuous connectivity; and without dependable incoming and outgoing communications, business operations grind to a halt.
• Mother Nature
  Floods. Fires. Earthquakes. Hurricanes. Lightning strikes. If you can name it, odds are it has destroyed someone’s business. Or it could even be something as seemingly innocuous as a simple electronic or mechanical malfunction. Whatever the cause, should the laws of nature and physics turn malicious, know that your valuable business data has a target on its back.

Long and short, Business Continuity Services are designed to ensure the organization’s ability not just to salvage but to restore its basic business operations and core profitability functions when they are temporarily taken offline.

The Critical Need for Business Continuity Services

Ask yourself: Are your servers backed up regularly? Is all your data stored exclusively on-site? Could your business weather a major equipment failure caused by a hard drive crash, flood, lightning strike, or even theft? Would disasters like these result in significant loss of revenue and productivity?

In the past, the redundant physical hardware infrastructure required for dependable business continuity plans was prohibitively expensive for most businesses. Today, however, those businesses can now enjoy those same (or better!) benefits, at a fraction of the cost, with on-demand cloud data backups, cloud-based disaster recovery, managed security plans, and other related services.

Although no one can prevent a disaster from happening, you can minimize its impact on your business by putting FullScope IT technology and plans in place in the event that disaster does strike.

Our team of experts will conduct a thorough risk assessment of your site, and then create a detailed and appropriate strategy that dovetails perfectly with your business needs, designed to get your employees back to work as soon as possible after the disaster.

Downtime means lost revenue. No one can predict natural disasters, acts of God, or other “unplanned incidents”; but you can stay in front of hardware and network failure with our time-tested business continuity tools and processes, designed for minimal data loss and a speedy recovery.

The FullScope IT Business Continuity Advantage

• Thorough assessment of risks to your specific business
• Implementation of a custom business continuity strategy
• On-demand access to our team of experts in backup and disaster recovery
• Peace of mind in knowing your mission-critical data is protected
• A great track record: our clients experience 99.99% uptime!

Business Continuity Q & A’s

• What are the biggest risks to an organization’s business continuity?

  Put simply, business disruptions can be caused by either natural forces (e.g., earthquake, tsunami, extreme weather) or man-made ones (deliberate cyber-attack, legal disputes, hardware failure). Examples of the proximate causes of business disruptions would include power failures, 100-year floods, interruption of communications, hardware breakdowns, lawsuits, and terrorism incidents. A diligent IT services provider seeks to mitigate the impact of all such disruptions on an organization’s productivity.

• What is the difference between Business Continuity Services (BCS) and Business Continuity Management (BCM)?

  While there is a certain overlap between BCS and BCM, they are not exactly synonymous. The term Business Continuity Services encompasses the specific individual tools and methodologies used by an organization to weather a crisis that can cause a significant business disruption, recover from the crisis, and return to the organization’s previous operational state. Such BCS tools and methodologies can include services such as off-site data backup, routine anti-virus software updates, and regulatory compliance audits.

  Business Continuity Management, on the other hand, refers to the way an organization responds to a crisis or, ideally, avoids it altogether. It is a matter of attitude and business philosophy more than specific protocols. The ultimate aim of BCM is to prevent disruptions through meticulous, pre-emptive planning; or, failing that, to allow mission-critical operations to continue functioning immediately after the crisis, and then to return the organization to full operations as soon as possible.

• What are the key facets of Business Continuity planning?

  A comprehensive Business Continuity Management Plan should include: Crisis management (also called “incident management”), Crisis communications, Emergency response, Disaster recovery, and Business function restoration

• Why does my organization need a Business Continuity Plan?

  First and foremost, a good Business Continuity Plan ensures the physical safety of employees, customers, vendors, and visitors on the organization’s premises. Secondly, it speeds up the time to full recovery from the disruption. Last but not least, it minimizes the long-term impact of the disruption on the organization’s operations, while also protecting its public reputation and strengthening the relationship with neighbors and stakeholders.

• What is the most important aspect of Business Continuity Management planning?

  The key goal is making sure your organization’s risks have been correctly identified and assessed. There’s no point in planning for incidents that have scant likelihood of occurring! Worse still, failing to identify actual risks can leave your organization hopelessly exposed. A professional Business Continuity Plan must be rooted in reality, and yet remain flexible to addressing unforeseen circumstances. In the end, such planning must include procedures that detail how to implement recovery strategies addressing risks involving loss of life, destruction of workplace and equipment, and compromising of information technology services and data.