For even the smallest organizations, staying competitive requires digital transformations that require at least the modernization and often the replacement of legacy technologies.
Many of your clients, however, may feel daunted by the complexity inherent in digital transformation projects — even modest ones like integrating multiple cloud services or virtualizing servers or deploying IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
That complexity can be a business killer because it triggers downtime. And nothing threatens your clients’ ability to sustain the technological resilience that’s so essential for organizational resilience quite like downtime.
Understanding the causes and dangers of downtime
When the complexities of digital transformation interfere with your clients’ operations, the effects can be described just as they are in #1 of this chart:
Top 10 risks/downtime events experienced in the last 3 years
1 IT failure of a critical system or application
2 Extreme weather or natural disaster
3 Theft of data
4 Cyberattack (data breach, ransomware, DDoS attack, etc.)
5 Critical infrastructure failure (power, water, transportation, etc.)
6 Customer privacy abuse, data breach, or fraud
7 Supply chain disruption/failure
8 Geopolitical events | social unrest
9 Customer backlash | adverse media exposure | social activism
10 Workplace misconduct
Source: Forrester/DRJ Survey 2019
Certainly, though, technological complexity isn’t the only cause of downtime, and in aggregate, the effects of downtime on small-to-midsize businesses are dire: 40% of small business never open after a disaster, according to FEMA, and 25% of those that do reopen fail within a year.
How digital transformation can reduce downtime
How, then, can you help your clients implement not just digital transformation but also the business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) capabilities so essential to true organizational resilience?
You can begin by persuading them to give up thinking about BC/DR as a cost center and instead recognize it as an opportunity to boost their competitiveness — something they can accomplish by embracing the highly managed and optimized resilience practices that are the hallmark of today’s leading-edge BC/DR services and tools.
You can also encourage them to understand the critical importance of BC/DR best practices. To get that conversation started, I offer a few basics:
- Ask and answer these key questions…
- What are our greatest risks/vulnerabilities?
- How have we mitigated these risks up to now?
- How does our digital infrastructure help us sustain/recover key operations?
- What should we do to improve?
- How should we roll out those improvements?
- As our needs evolve, what’s the best process for updating our technologies and infrastructure?
- Design technological resilience around the integration of data protection and cybersecurity and the unified management of all data sources, including on-premises data centers as well as all public cloud services, etc.;
- Choose cloud-based services that integrate data backup/protection and disaster recovery;
- Use cloud-based backup to protect as-a-service applications;
- Regularly test the organization’s ability to recover backed-up data;
- Deploy root cause analysis tools so operational issues can be handled in near-real-time;
- Deploy analytical engines that can use historical and performance data to generate proactive recommendations; and
- Engage an experienced managed services provider with a technical reach that can address the full lifecycle of your clients’ resilience needs, can customize their services to fit your clients’ requirements, and knows how to deliver responsive, knowledgeable support.
