The contemporary entrepreneur knows that to achieve long-term success, business operations need to run on smart systems. Companies that run on data systems and operation applications know the value of technological advantage. It is efficient, consistent, and it saves you money on manpower — bottom line: it is (literally) an income-generating machine.
Any person involved in a business endeavor or finance will tell you that it’s always the numbers that tell the story — whether you’re doing either good or bad for the quarter, or if you’re shooting straight for high growth or loss in the coming year.
Business institutions and innovation hubs have sung praise time and time again for the data-driven business. Understanding the significance of how data can propel your business for growth can positively impact how you run your operations.
However, businesses that are reliant on virtual platforms to be responsible for daily operations are also at risk of experiencing system crashes and failures. This not only puts your business at risk of losing money and productivity, but it can cause a significant setback on operations.
When operations are down, it can cripple you from sustaining growth.
Data-driven systems rely on backups, cleanups, and maintenance. To ensure that systems are running smoothly, companies more than often rely on human intervention to do upkeep. However, addressing system issues through human intervention is time-consuming, costly, and still prone to error. This consumes time and money that can be better spent on running your company. This is why operating systems should have IT resilience.
RESILIENCE IS KEY
Besides keeping operation applications and data systems in good condition, IT resilience at its most basic is the imperative of an organization to maintain their service level standards at all times. This means that operations should still be able to run at a certain point such that the process is not compromised — even when issues or challenges present themselves.
This could be caused by equipment or hardware failure, a power outage, a malicious attack, or other disruptions that can affect operations. In the case of smart systems, IT resilience is the ability of a network or system to quickly recover and resume operations. It is essentially a question of how capable your system is of adapting to both internal and external changes that can occur at any given time.
Some companies have taken to preparing disaster recovery and business continuity plans to execute in the event of a threat. However, according to recent studies, over 56 percent of companies do not have any plans or policies to address future issues.
SO, HOW CAN IT RESILIENCE PROTECT MY BUSINESS?
Most IT disruptions are caused by internal issues. This is why some companies make it a point to have a backup plan for immediate action. Having no established plan that comprehensively addresses possible issues and problems can lead to severe damage to the entire operations process. Companies that have experienced some system issue with no prepared gameplan have witnessed user errors, infrastructure failures, and breaches in security and ransomware.
IT resilience allows for seamless automation in the data protection and recovery process. If your business doesn’t sleep, then that means operations doesn’t either. With smart systems and data centers running 24 hours a day, seven days a week — anticipating the worst can cost your company more than you should be comfortable with.
Investing in IT resilience tools can seem like an unnecessary expense at first, which is why most companies choose to opt out. However, it can save you thousands of dollars that can be better spent on driving growth and transformation for your business.
According to one study by the Ponemon Institute, when a data center goes down, it can cost around $5, 600 per minute. Additionally, an incident can last an average of 90 minutes. This means that the average cost per incident is around $505, 500.
By establishing tools and systems that integrate IT resilience, the impact of costly service disruptions can be dramatically minimized. This can give you the ability to protect sensitive data, including the applications used in operations. In fact, this can even improve your overall service levels, allowing your customers to experience better quality.
RESILIENCE MEANS MORE VALUE
How we run our businesses has changed over the last couple of years. When an organization’s system fails, a disruption in service can stand to lose you millions of dollars in the span of only a few minutes. With the threat of just a single event potentially causing damage to business operations, prevention is just as good as mitigation — perhaps, even the more preferred alternative.
Aside from mitigating risks and disasters, IT resilience can strengthen your system infrastructure. IT resilience tools allow smart systems to have self-directional capabilities, which anticipate threats and protects themselves before it continues any further. This ensures that your business maintains healthy and stable operations, providing consistent top-notch service for your customers.
When you have systems that are both self-sufficient and -sustaining, it can add value for your customers — accelerating your business towards more and more growth. According to popular and wildly successful CIOs, the challenge is to keep operations online such that when the market demands your services, that demand is always ready to be met.
To be successful in 2018, your business needs to, not only be on the defense, but it constantly needs to be scaling its offense. In fact, it can’t afford to be asleep — downtime is out of the question. In the long run, it is all a matter of being proactive than reactive. Developing strategies and backup plans are useless if your business does not have the infrastructure to support them.
Digital acceleration can be the means to establish your organization as markets continue to evolve. To achieve this, you will need the right tools. If you want to drive further growth for your business, building on infrastructure that integrates IT resilience could be the key to shooting for long-term success. After all, it’s not just about keeping the engine running — it’s about putting yourself at the forefront of the race.
