How do mobiles help with business continuity?
How do mobiles help with business continuity? This tragic tale will bring home their necessity.
Your new unpaid intern decides to have a puff when everyone is out to lunch, despite the office rules. Unfortunately, the carelessly discarded cigarette (See this is why paying interns is a good idea!) that lands in your paper recycling bin (Top marks for that.) results in your team, having just ambled back from lunch, finding a pile of ashes, a tired fire crew and your intern lighting up from the embers of what really looks like the melted, charred remains of your brand new laptop.
Your first thought, hopefully, is, “Thank God the intern is OK.”
Maybe, after the fire investigation report, your compassion will evaporate.
Your second thought may be, “Oh no, the server!”, or perhaps, “Everything was on that laptop!”
Whatever it is, you will be in a panic about keeping your business running, whatever that may entail: suppliers, customers, access to banking, and so on. Possibly you had all your passwords stored locally on your laptop.
Obviously, this is an extreme scenario. However, in recent times, we’ve had the lockdown due to covid that disrupted virtually all businesses and at multiple levels including supply, production and delivery. Many businesses died as a result. Some due to the lack of walk-in customers but, many others, due to poor continuity planning. Take a quick trip over to the experts in this field where you can read an article outlining just what happened to three companies. Take especial interest in the section on mobile phones.
There is an old saying, prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Unfortunately, we rarely do proper preparation for the worst. One of the companies in the article above had made plans for their office not being available. However, they planned on this being a matter of weeks. Not the worst scenario as lockdown proved.
So, let’s go back to your team strolling back to the office; one of them joking, “Hope the intern hasn’t burned the place down.”
You laugh along and reply, “Don’t worry, everything is stored in the cloud and we all use mobiles.”
When you arrive at the scene of the inferno, you calmly chat to the intern to make sure they are OK (that sort of thing is good for staff morale). Next, you turn to your team, “OK team, business as usual, but you’re all working from home until we get this mess sorted out. Just as we’ve practiced” Note that last bit. As they say, practice makes perfect. There’s another old saying, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Practicing your plan reveals its flaws, which you can then fix. If you don’t practice, then those flaws will appear at the very moment you wish that you had practiced.
You watch them disperse to their cars thinking great, most of them will be working in about half an hour. So glad I made that shift to mobiles. You smile, contented with your wisdom and foresight. Until, of course, you realise, your car, your vintage Ferrari, was parked in the special director’s space right next to…
So, we end this cautionary tale by getting back to reality. Reliance on outdated landlines, local storage and everyone having to be in the office is not planning for continuity. It’s the opposite. Those decisions could result in your business collapsing overnight.
True continuity is when you know things will keep running smoothly no matter what happens. That can only be achieved by making your business truly capable of working remotely.
The question here is: Are you ready for anything?
Certification in business continuity
You need training in business continuity. The recent past underlines that necessity. We highly recommend checking out the courses at BCI. They are the leaders in this field.
We don’t get anything for referring you. We just think it is a great course and you really should:
- Get someone on the course
- Do what they tell you to do when they finish the course.
Try our short course on business continuity
You can also run through our short course covering this very subject.
It’s not as good as the BCI one. They are the experts. However, it does cover the basics.
Where should I get my business continuity mobile solution from?
The best resource you can have for any journey is a guide. You need someone who knows what is worth having and what you should avoid and, more importantly, how to combine everything into a seamless package.
That’s where VirtualFirst comes in. We can use our expertise to build you a package that meets your exact needs. We take away the worry and potential pitfalls and provide you with a solution that is both bespoke and expandable.
This article is published just to make you aware of the need for moving into mobile business. It is part of a series of articles to be published over the coming weeks which are focussed on how mobiles boost every aspect of business activity.
Try our business continuity crossword
Quick quiz on mobiles and business continuity
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