Coronavirus: A pop quiz to test business continuity
The COVID-19 coronavirus spread across every continent except Antarctica in less than 2 months since the first official case was reported in Wuhan, China. Many businesses have failed in response to the crisis timely for various reasons including delayed warning from the World Health Organization (WHO) as well as non-scalable remote work setup. In the current digital transforming world, speed of response is more important than ever, especially in dealing with disruptive events. A structurally built business continuity plan delivers the superpower to ensure your organization is up to speed to strategize a proper response during a crisis.
In good time, businesses often forget to invest sufficiently on contingency plans. "This is a wake-up call to organizations that focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience.”, according to Sandy Shen, Gartner analyst. The coronavirus outbreak becomes a pop quiz to test how resilient a business is. This is also a good time for IT leaders to re-emphasize the importance of business continuity planning.
Crisis Creates Opportunity
Many business leaders treat business continuity plans as a defense mechanism, or (sunk) cost center. However, solid planning can be a powerful invested asset to outcompete the competitors at their turbulent times. In other words, keeping a high level of productivity already establishes an unprecedented competitive advantage of the business. Though there is no one-size-fit-all for business continuity plans, IT leaders should take a deep look on things that matter to your business.
Applications and Data
Email is unavoidably the number-one application to keep your business alive. Video-conferencing connects all different teams and different levels of employees to create virtual office dynamics. It is important to ensure employees can remotely access the required data and top-level applications securely to perform their duties at home.
Hardware Support and Connectivity
A lot of businesses prefer installing desktop computers for employees for various advantages including cheaper capital expenditure, better data protection and lower maintenance cost. However, the setup limits the mobility of employees, and it hits the business operation hard when employees can’t go to work. IT leaders need to ensure delivering remote access at scale. In most cases, 70 percent of the bandwidth is outbound, but remote work turns network traffic upside down. Enabling employees to securely work with their own devices enhances the agility of the business.
Risk assessment and Security
Risk profile is largely different between good and bad times. Remote work creates new opportunities for hackers to exploit the unusual vulnerability. IT leaders should creatively implement security measures at both technological and administrative levels, and raise employees’ awareness of the latest phishing and scam techniques. These measures complement one another.
At Resolve Technology, we leverage the latest technology with an automation mindset, and create the best-fit remote work and security solutions for business to not only sail through the storm, but also not waste the opportunity to widen the market lead.
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