Business continuity matters. It matters for profits, for client satisfaction – and for keeping you in business in the long run. Business continuity planning is an important element in ensuring continuing operations. Partnering with the right technology firm is key given how critical technology is to business operations.

In this article we will take a look at the contribution that your IT partner can make to ensuring business continuity and outline why, when looking for IT support London companies need to seek a partner that does much more than deliver technical support – why you need a partner that helps you to deliver business continuity too.

Ensuring your technology solution is fit

For most companies, business continuity is a broad topic that goes beyond technology alone – including key staff and facilities, for example. But for today’s businesses continuity is typically highly dependent on technology solutions. If the technology fails, the business fails.

Your IT support partner will help you configure your technology solution in a way that persists and supports business continuity – even in a crisis.

Support for remote employees

In delivering IT support London based MSPs will increasingly be focusing on delivering solutions that also enable remote working, even though base camp for their clients will still be in London. The degree to which there will be a return to work in an office is still open to question, and therefore business continuity increasingly depends on continuity in remote working.

For example, while setting up a VPN can be done by a relatively inexperienced user, setting up consistent, reliable VPN use for hundreds of employees at a cost-effective rate is a far more complex task that’s best handled by your IT partner.

It is also common for staff to experience PC, software, and network glitches at home. These can interrupt important operations and your IT support partner can boost continuity by using their expertise to swiftly solve these issues.

Ensuring your business is cyber secure

Cybersecurity is one of the biggest threats to business continuity. A single cyberattack can take out all of your business systems in one blow and it can mean an extensive period to recover from such an attack.

In purchasing IT support London companies should find a partner that can deliver tight cybersecurity – strong preventative measures, strong monitoring and strong response. While it can be challenging to fully secure a technology estate against cyberattacks, best efforts – aided by your IT support partner – will minimize the risks of a successful attack, and reduce the opportunity for an attack that can disrupt business continuity.

Configuring a continuity plan

Day-to-day operations should, in theory, ensure business continuity but there is always a point in time where something unexpected happens – or where operational pressures are simply too high. A fallback plan is, therefore, critical and your IT support partner is central in helping your business develop a fallback plan that ensures that your IT is up and running quickly.

As a first step, your technology partner should set up systems monitoring that can help forewarn any growing issues, which will help speed up the response speed. But responses matter too, and responses can be mounted far more successfully if strong, realistic, and dependable fallback plans are in place.

For example, your continuity plan should include alternative connectivity providers that can rapidly step in – even switching over on the fly should your business experience a cut in connectivity from its main provider.

Or, where you are dependent on a particular channel for communication, such as email, your IT provider can help you to set up an alternative channel that can ensure continued communications should the primary channel fail.

Exactly what you need to do to ensure continuity in case of technology failure will depend on your unique business requirements, but the critical element will always be the planning that compensates for failure.

Avoiding the pitfalls of business continuity

Finally, let’s take a look at some of the common pitfalls around business continuity planning and how, when taking advantage of IT support London companies can also ensure that they avoid making mistakes in planning their business continuity strategy.

First, consider testing. Often when working on a business continuity plan, assumptions are made and tested, but it is easy for companies that are not highly experienced in business continuity planning to make over-optimistic assumptions – and to test in ways that are not truly robust. Your IT support partner will help you to avoid this critical pitfall.

Don’t neglect your backups

Access is another potential business continuity pitfall and your IT support company will help you ensure that, for example, there is sufficient remote user license available to support fast growth in the number of remote employees. In a crunch, critical credentials can also suddenly be found to be misused – and your business may find it cannot get into important systems when it needs to. Your IT support partner will ensure that critical credentials are always accessible.

As the last point – backups are often something that let companies down at the point where they need to activate a business continuity plan. Backups may simply fail to restore if you have not regularly tested the restore process.

But there is another problem: validating the restore process can be difficult. Your IT support partner will help you ensure that you set up a validation process that gives you confidence that your business continuity plan has been carried out successfully.