Engage an Optus communication expert by calling or click here to email.
|
While most small to medium sized businesses agree that Disaster Preparedness is much better than Disaster Recovery, most are ill prepared to deal with a disaster that could impact their business. This is because many businesses fail to prioritize the importance of Disaster Preparedness in their business planning, and underestimate the catastrophic effects that recovering from a disaster could have on their business.
Proactive planning and investment will always be much less time consuming and costly than reactively dealing with major business disruptions.
Here are a few simple questions that all businesses should explore to maximize a solid Disaster Preparedness plan:
- Are your critical business systems protected by surge protection and battery back-up systems? One of the primary reasons for system failure during power outages is brown out. When this happens you may never know it but it can cause irreversible harm to expensive and critical equipment.
- Can your employees access their required business tools remotely, such as telephone, email and customer databases? If you cannot open your business, your customers still need to be supported. Simple tools like email, telephone, and customer databases need to be accessed remotely. This allows communication with your customers from employee’s homes or remote sites, while remaining completely transparent to your customers.
- Can you communicate with your employees and customers transparently to alert them of office closings or changed business hours?
- Is your core data safe in the event you lose your systems? While many companies think so, if you are not engaging in automated remote back-ups, it may not be as secure as you think.
- Are you systems redundant? If so, is the redundancy distributed to other locations?
- Have you documented your plan and process? It is easy to overlook details in a disaster scenario, so prepare something clear and detailed, and review it frequently.
- Have you tested your back-up systems? The last thingyou want is to test your back-up systems in an emergency and find out the hard way that something doesn’t work as expected.
This is a simple checklist to ensure your business is prepared for the unexpected and to minimize business disruption. Most of these are not hard to achieve.
As Experts in Voice, Video, and Data technologies, Optus will be happy to help you build a roadmap and assist you in updating your plan as needed. Optus will always be there to immediately respond to any customer in need, but we prefer to help you build a solid plan of Disaster Avoidance.
|
