Business Continuity and ExchangeDefender
It’s winter! And winter is a GREAT time to talk about business continuity with your clients. For most of us, in the continental US at least, the winter months bring the highest likelihood of weather-related business disruptions. Where I live, we spend about a quarter of the year under the constant threat of snow storms that will cripple transportation and make it impossible for anyone to travel anywhere safely.
Business continuity is the ability of an organization to continue to function after some kind of event that could hinder its operation. These events need not be those highly unlikely natural disasters, or terrorist attacks, or national emergencies. Events that affect business’ ability to operate can be seen every day—snow storms, simple hardware failure, network security breach, power outage…the things that can get in the way of a business that depends on IT are many and one needn’t far to find them.
Business continuity is all about planning how to keep the business up and running in the face of any of those things that can try to slow or halt operations.
Frankly, business continuity planning can be an intense and complex process, but it’s worth undertaking because there’s no way to short cut the kind of risk assessments and SWOT analysis that you’ll need to make the appropriate decisions for protecting the business. It can also be relatively simple in many cases, particularly for smaller businesses. There’s not enough space in this blog for a full discussion of the business continuity planning process with clients, though it’s important to note that we have a wealth of resources available to our partners that deliver in-depth explanations and step by step instructions, available at www.exchangedefender.com/XDUniversity.php .
In a world where so much communication happens digitally, and our dependence continues to grow, delivering continual access to messaging can be one of the most important elements of business continuity planning. A particularly powerful and unique tool that accomplishes this within the Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 solution from ExchangeDefender is LiveArchive.
Using ExchangeDefender’s secure standby servers, up to a year’s worth of inbound and outbound email is available and actionable through Outlook Web Access at all times. Neither you nor your client has to actively manage this service in any way – the LiveArchive service is always on to ensure that no matter what, whether the power goes out in the office or the office team gets snowed in or anything else, users will always be able to access critical email and stay productive.
Do you find this information useful?
If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders, and more.
Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777