IT is critical for your business, perhaps more so than the office you’re in or the chair you’re sitting on. If IT fails, your business can go down with it, with lost revenue and business disruption making up nearly 83% of the average costs associated with downtime.
You already know you need business continuity as an insurance policy to protect your IT environment. As we’ve spoken to senior IT leadership at companies throughout Washington D.C., Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, we’ve found a lot of misconceptions still driving this critical IT decision. These are the myths that we hear the most:
Myth #1 Business continuity is the same as it’s ever been
The next generation of business continuity surprisingly comes from the cloud – and it makes sense when you think about it. The cloud makes business continuity far less expensive and offers superior continuity with global redundancy. Backups and recovery are suddenly far more flexible and scalable than managing business continuity configurations with tentacles on the ground and in traditional data centers. In the cloud model, you have a lot less to worry about, can afford to protect everything in your environment.
Myth #2 – Business continuity is so expensive you must pick and choose
The idea of being able to only do so much with business continuity is based on the expensive capital outlay to basically duplicate infrastructure costs and protect critical assets.
With cloud-based solutions, there is no capital outlay like your traditional disaster recovery solutions. It costs far less to protect everything with cloud continuity solutions that companies often have to shell out to protect just the mission-critical apps and systems.
You also don’t pay for it until you need it. With a cloud solution, you pay a fraction to reserve the continuity space; once you need it, it’s there and kicks into action. And even then, it still is a big savings over on-premise models.
Myth #3 – I set up business continuity, it’s fine
When was the last time you tested your business continuity with a full failover test? Business continuity is not “set it and forget it”, as many businesses who had to test their solution during a disaster can tell you. Even if your business continuity is fine now, what does the future hold?
We never recommend throwing out perfectly good solutions and going back to square one. That’s not necessary. It is important to look at how to augment what you have and what the evolution of your continuity solution will look like. A hybrid, evolving model can help bridge those gaps and set you up for the future.
Myth #4 – you can weather the downtime on non-critical apps
This is simply not the way you need to think about business continuity anymore. What part of your business gets neglected and how long can you weather the downtime for? Downtime can call into question the very viability of the company – and given the costs associated with every minute of downtime ($5,600 per minute, on average, according to Gartner), the speed of recovery is one of the most critical aspects. How fast can you bounce back?
Myth #5 – Changing solutions means Rip and Replace
Again, this only applies to premise-based models. As with most cloud solutions, a cloud-based business continuity solution is easy to get proof of concept at minimal or no cost. The failover and testing options are also far simpler than the premise-based models, so you don’t have to worry about whether it’s going to be there when you need it.
It is agile enough that we can implement it and, if you don’t like it, we can turn it off quickly, with minimal disruption.
Transitioning to a cloud-based disaster recovery comes with a small learning curve, of course. Any new solution would. We recommend working with an IT partner with a proven track record like Nortec that understands the Microsoft cloud stack and can offer expert guidance. Our team works with yours and can take it as far as you want us to or set it up and hand over the reins with full training and support.
Talk to us about what a cloud-based business continuity could offer your IT environment. Contact us to get started.
