With the latest BCI report showing that only a quarter of businesses expect to go back to their old business model, it is clear that new ways of working are here for the foreseeable future. So, where does this leave your existing emergency response and business continuity strategies? We may be mid pandemic but that doesn’t mean a second concurrent incident won’t happen.
With most of your senior management team working remotely from site, what happens if you have a serious office fire now? How are you going to respond, can you maintain social distancing on site, can you field a full incident management team given people’s underlying health conditions and caring duties, or are you going to have to work differently?
With the massive shift from physical estate to virtual estate, we have now built in a huge dependency on uptime, including for some on hastily purchased solutions brought in to fix the urgent need to work remotely at scale. To date infrastructure providers and IT teams have been doing a great job. However, with Microsoft Teams falling over in Europe early in the pandemic and Zoom calls being hijacked, how resilient are your delivery strategies now? Do you have a second line capability in place to fall back on? Are you ready for the next Wannacry, AWS failure or ransomware attack and how seriously would your new ways of working be compromised if your IT fails? You know the mantra, "it is not a case of if but when..."
If the pandemic hadn’t already made clear the need for robust incident management and continuity strategies, then planning for the huge shift in operational delivery approaches makes this fundamental to business survival. Now is the time to review your capabilities for resilience. Your customers and your staff will increasingly expect you to be able to demonstrate to them that you have this in hand not just to protect customer experience but also to protect their jobs. If you don’t you can, in time, expect them to find a provider / employer that does.
If you’d like to learn more about our resilience gap analysis service, please give me a call to discuss how I can help. 07812 024 003
