The fast-paced competitive market where we live today has forced businesses to consider critical processes to be delivered continuously and without interruption. Therefore, when considering potential downtime, the objective is no longer to resume activities in the shortest time possible but to have backup processes and proactive checkups to prevent downtime from even occurring.
The endeavor is to create a Business Continuity Plan that leverages technology to ensure that critical operations continue to be functional even during a disaster. In a successful IT Business continuity plan, the company and its end-users will not be aware of any issue since their key processes will not be disrupted. As technology is an enabler of businesses, the ask is clear: to implement technologies that can proactively be monitored and maintained providing insights into potential business issues before they even happen.
IT Business Continuity Planning in three steps
Building a proactive IT managed service approach that works for your organization and guarantees business continuity is not an easy task. Experienced managed providers will have a process to understand the business priorities of your organization developing different layers of response depending on how critical each area is to the overall business.
This process will consider three key points:
- Business Impact Analysis – the goal is to identify the organization's critical services and/or products from an IT business continuity perspective. These will be rank from high to low depending on how critical they are, the higher the rank, more attention is paid to it.
- Steps for IT business continuity – once the most critical processes and technologies have been identified, a plan is set in place to proactively monitor the infrastructure environment outlining the steps needed to ensure business continuity under any circumstance.
- Readiness to implement the IT Business Continuity Plan – The steps have been clearly identified, now considerations such as skills and capabilities need to be addressed to make sure your organization is ready to take action. When you partner with a managed service provider, they have an extended team of certified engineers with knowledge in multiple technology areas, who are ready to implement your IT business continuity plan without any hiccups.
Why is Proactive IT Managed Important in Business Continuity?
Digital transformation has completely taken the global business environment; at this point, some of your critical processes are running on a digital platform of some sort. Hence, a proactive IT solution needs to consider investing in business intelligence and analytics, cloud, and mobile services to ensure a clean execution of a business continuity plan. The risks of setting this proactive IT processes on your own is that you can miss considerations like disaster recovery, technology lifecycle, network management or even security vulnerabilities; reason why mid-sized organizations often seek help in experienced managed services providers to build a proactive IT solution that enables business continuity.
Using a proactive approach to technology will help your business in:
- Increasing Remote Accessibility, an IT team doesn't work in a fixed office location anymore, or even more disruption don't tend to only occur in working hours; it is more likely that they occur when your IT team is traveling between branches or on-call from their homes. When selecting a proactive IT support system, make sure that it allows for remote access, where the IT team can access information and manage the network from wherever they are. Modern technology infrastructure solutions will provide control and monitor dashboards that are easy to access from any geographical location, not only ensuring you can quickly resolve issues but generating timely alerts and actioning tactics to avoid downtime.
- Improving security, the flexibility cloud-based solutions give to businesses also come with higher security risks; hence the epicenter of proactive IT must be cybersecurity and a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy needs to be put in place. Proactively monitoring your environment and setting up in place technologies with capabilities such as retrospective security, is essential in preventing a breach. The complexity of the cybersecurity landscape forces organizations to seek guidance from IT specialist in this area, finding partners that hold multiple certifications and that can see cybersecurity as an overall strategy is vital.
- Reallocating resources from control to innovation, when companies take a proactive approach to manage their network and systems, resources can be reallocated it from monitoring and control to new innovative projects that are conducive to business growth. With a proactive IT management set in place, your technology environment can be "automated" to seek and resolve potential issues before they occur reducing the time and effort your team would have to dedicate to "put down fires".
A proactive IT management can have a significant impact on business continuity; the fewer things break, the less time you'll spend fixing them. However, setting up an IT business continuity plan with a proactive approach can be a tedious and time-consuming task, and although the long-term benefits outweigh the time invested today not every organization can afford to breathe, think, strategize, and implement it on their own. This is why many businesses have come to Tekscape, seeking for an IT managed service provider with a proactive approach to technology management. We have helped organizations to increase their market effectiveness, productivity, and security measures, providing proactive IT management alongside preventative IT maintenance to help prevent IT issues and downtime. Making a business case for an IT managed service partner might be challenging but when analyzed from a business continuity stand point this can be the best option for your organization.
Proactive IT Managed Services
A proactive approach to IT managed services will give you peace of mind, your critical technologies and processes are constantly being monitored to detect any issues before they can cause any business disruptions. Partners like Tekscape have an approach with clear steps that add value, visibility and transparency into the management of your technology infrastructure.
Learn More about Tekscape’s Approach to Proactive IT Services.
