For any organisation that’s been hit by a major event that’s knocked its IT systems offline, the experience can feel like having one’s hands cut-off.
Being unable to access critical IT systems and data can grind both trade and operations to a halt until systems engineers are able to kick their business continuity plans into action and successfully recover by whatever means.
Even then a successful recovery and restoration isn’t guaranteed as already busy IT managers are potentially unlikely to have considered worst-case scenarios. In some cases, especially following events such as fires, floods and other unforeseeable catastrophes at business premises, it may not even be possible to physically access hardware and systems required to orchestrate a disaster recovery.
Before having to face the unthinkable, the smart choice for organisations determined to have a fail-safe means of ensuring business continuity is to outsource IT Disaster Recovery to a third-party managed service provider (MSP).
Top 6 reasons for outsourcing your Business Continuity Planning (BCP):
- Improve your Business Continuity Planning. A good MSP will do much more than just deploy a BCP solution and anonymously store data in a warehouse somewhere, they will work with you to understand your organisation and its data sources, as well as your potential points of vulnerability, before factoring these into a better, more holistic solution should the worst ever occur.
- Greatly reduces the time required to restore operations. Even the best intentioned and most prepared of organisations will struggle to have their operations up and running again anywhere near as quickly as a dedicated MSP will be able to achieve with its more concentrated resources, independent systems access, and battle-tested experience in these situations.
- An MSP should have the most up-to-date, best-of-breed technologies in-place. A good MSP will always be looking at ways to improve their response, investing in leading-edge technologies that it would be difficult to get sign-off for internally. For instance, Brennan IT has invested in software from Commvault, Veeam, and Zerto that boasts hypervisor replication technologies enabling super-fast recovery in the Cloud and hybrid environments in hours instead of days, or weeks. We couple that with best-in-class hardware storage solution, Huawei’s OceanStor, so that customers can benefit from a complete, truly best-of-breed business continuity plan.
- Frees-up time for systems managers to work on more productive work associated with increasing productivity and efficiency within their organisation. This is especially important for organisations that are growing fast and with highly dispersed systems and data. Often attempts to take stock of everything can end-up being disorganised and ad-hoc even if they have the skills to be able to do so.
- Maintaining the requisite tools and expertise for business continuity onsite isn’t cheap. And those additional costs become harder to justify the longer the company operates without a major event occurring. An MSP is never asleep on the job, is vigilant, and will be observant 24/7/365.
- Greater peace of mind. While new digital technologies such as the cloud, mobile devices, and faster, more available broadband networks have made doing business easier and cheaper, they also expose organisations to more risks due to the greater challenges of keeping track. An MSP can do this for you, meaning that you’ll never forget to factor a new potential weak point in your business continuity plan.
There are many more benefits associated with having an MSP-managed IT business continuity plan that we take for granted should the worst happen. For instance, think about your relationships with suppliers, partners and other stakeholders: frustrations and tensions can easily escalate if other organisations relying on your operations are affected by outages; being down for days – even hours – can drastically impact confidence in your organisation and jeopardise long-term relationships.
Even more worryingly, customers that can’t get what they need and want immediately will likely take their business elsewhere and you should never want to give them a reason to try-out your competitors!
In addition to losing money, the brand damage that major outages can wreak is increasingly difficult to repair given how quickly news can travel on social media.
It pays, therefore, to partner with an experienced and properly-resourced Managed Services Provider who can help you to develop a comprehensive IT business continuity plan that you know can be executed the moment it is required, relieving you of the costs, efforts and anxiety associated with attempting such a major undertaking on your own.
Brennan IT has been named Australia’s leading managed service provider for the past 9 years running in the MSP 501 rankings from Channel Futures, and Business Continuity Planning is a core competency. Speak with us now and one of our expert engineers and business consultants can start helping you with your BCP today.