If the COVID pandemic has taught business owners anything, it’s that just when you think the worst has happened, things can escalate. Planning for the worst when you’re in unprecedented times can seem pretty daunting, but there are a few tried, tested and well-understood techniques that you can use, supported by technology, to ensure you’re agile enough to see out pretty much anything.

“It's critical for businesses to make business continuity and disaster recovery plans if they hope to survive the worst happening”, says Euphoria Telecom CEO John Woollam. A Mecer study conducted at the beginning of the pandemic indicates that some 51% of companies globally do not have a business continuity plan, despite their proven efficiency at mitigating risks and helping businesses to survive disasters. “Business continuity (BC) plans ensure that the business can keep going when something goes wrong, for example a fire, flood or cyber-attack, while disaster recovery (DR) deals with recovering vital ICT systems and infrastructures following a disaster, natural or man-made. These disciplines are closely interlinked. For smaller businesses, these have both been made much simpler by the advent of managed cloud computing services.”

There are three big things you need to do take care of when it comes to BC and DR:

• Back it up - back up, back up and back up. If your IT systems are not cloud-based, you’re at risk if the physical hardware is destroyed or inaccessible. So if your email runs on a server in the corner of the office, or in a server room, or your employees have their emails downloaded to their laptops, it’s a risk. If everything is hosted on local hardware that is tied to and only accessible from a fixed location, it is at risk of being rendered inaccessible. Keep regular backups of everything that is critical to running your business - from email to accounting to CRM and ERP systems. Schedule daily backups, and test them often. If you’re not sure what to back up, ask yourself what your business cannot survive without, and go from there. Ideally things should be backed up to the cloud but if you need physical back-ups, make sure they are stored in a facility that is safe from floods, fires and the like. 
   
• Take it to the cloud - managed cloud services offer businesses a host of technology solutions that will fit pretty much any needs and budget. From backups to storage to ERP, CRM, accounting, office productivity and even cloud-based telephony and call centre solutions, there is very little - technology-wise - that cannot be hosted in the cloud. What this means for BC and DR is that as long as you have an internet connection and a device, you and your teams can reach your systems and carry on working. 
   
• Make sure it’s mobile - end user devices are the weak point here, if they're not mobile. Desktop machines offer their advantages but they’re hard to move around, and if you can’t get to them, or they’re destroyed, they may as well not exist. Equipping your teams with laptops and smart phones can mean the difference between keeping going or closing. If you’re big enough and need to have people in central, physical locations, investigate paying for access to a disaster recovery site to ensure you have what you need to keep trading.