How Continuity And Recovery Matter In Regards To Your Strategy Of Digital Transformation

It is estimated that 60 minutes of downtime causes a loss of more than $300,000 to a business enterprise. For almost every organization, that comes as legal complications, loss of productivity, or situations with higher risk, like an adverse effect on people’s lives and sources of income in financial and healthcare sectors.

Anyhow, there is a fairly clear case for uptime in IT, but people do not always deem disaster recovery, backup, plus business continuity strategic priorities. Rather, efforts tend to be focused on just marking things as completed on a list.

Have you ever considered what the case for business continuity is, plus why it has to be a foundation for any enterprise that pursues continuous digital transformation?

An Ever-Growing Requirement

The field of business continuity covers the individuals, places of work, and tools needed for enterprises to operate in a smooth way. Digital transformation constantly changes the existing balance of that situation. For instance, when confronted with the coronavirus epidemic, several industries had to put ways of delivering services remotely into practice. Even processes that would usually need an in-person approach, such as healthcare, are now relying on video conferencing software to discuss with and cater to their clientele.

A physical business presence may keep being essential for some services to be continuous, but several organizations discover that it is possible to assist their clients inside a remote paradigm.

Now, what effects does that have on the strategy of business continuity? Enterprises that made progress in their journey of digital transformation had an advantage over others for the pandemic-induced new normal. Therefore, those enterprises are responding more quickly to allow more remote collaboration, resiliency, and business efficiencies.

Paying for digital transformation allows separating your staff from conventional ways of service delivery. Architecting sound solutions that are based on cloud computing, allows enterprises to drive down the requirement for backup site locations and cause their business to be more responsive and agile.

In What Way Does Digital Transformation Make Continuity Better?

In turn, the digital transformation process can enhance continuity too. Several digital transformation endeavors are good for business continuity, just because digital operations work in a resilient and distributed way. The process mentioned above is about digitalizing manual processes, adopting cloud services when possible, as well as exploring fresh technology solutions and processes to offer innovative and efficient business operations.

The most practical implementations of those efforts include the following.

• Making a company’s networks, data, and applications remotely accessible to keep its staff from becoming tied to one worksite and rather letting them access a centralized service or two from anywhere and at any time.
• Cloud-based productivity and collaboration solutions, which include video conferences, email, webchats, file sharing, and office apps.
• Process modernization digitalizing manual processes at any time that is possible.
• The process of automating digital workflows, which include IT configuration and administration.

In those cases, digital transformation possibly enables the following, thereby improving continuity.

• It enables users to tap into business information systems and control in what ways they communicate with those systems.
• It allows fostering collaboration as well as efficiency through automation and modernization

Besides, cloud-based solutions are made to become resilient as well as shun SPOFs, like file storage on an in-house workstation or disk array. This means should an enterprise’s primary office become unavailable due to any reason, then its staff could disperse with no loss of access to vital services or data.

Below is a list of ways in which enterprises can exploit business continuity in order to help make progress in digital transformation.

Using Continuity Software For Hybrid Migration Processes

Several digital tools for business continuity, especially disaster recovery (DR) software, are useable for workload mobility and cloud migrations, offering a quick and cost-effective road to cloud technology. Migrating through disaster recovery helps you make sure of avoiding lengthy downtime as recovery transitions to cloud-based servers when your target location is functional and tested. Utilizing cloud-based data recovery solutions enables smooth migration of even thousands of VM sets. Besides, you can implement policies for validating functionality and configurations before dedicating yourself to the process of migration, thus pulling those VM sets back.

Radically Changing Security For Your New Perimeter

Nowadays, information security should cover both corporate and personal computers, mobile devices, and laptops. That means you cannot count only on controlling virtual private network access any longer. That requires a change from the process of perimeter security solidifying to the so-called ‘zero trust’ models, plus an emphasis on both identity and access management.

Cloud-based services and applications utilized for critical operations must be part of the security strategy. Why? Because you cannot think that there are no threats in Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, and user devices. Zero Trust’s basic quality is this: activity, on the whole, is verified in an explicit manner, and automatic enforcement of security controls. In the event of security being applied to business continuity, it would be vital to maintain the access controls even as your main workplaces cannot be accessed.

Performing That Transformative Next Action

After having recovery software and business continuity technologies in place, you would be better poised to not only support innovation but also do the next thing in your continuing transformation process. A recovery strategy that serves as a basis, plus a tested strategy for continuity offers a sense of being safe when pursuing alternative digital modernization and digital transformation endeavors such as automated processes and serverless computing.

Considering what is at risk, business continuity becomes a must to safeguard an enterprise from security threats and downtime, plus it can improve and even accelerate digital transformation endeavors. Information Technology organizations that prioritize business continuity can gain from it repeatedly over time.