TelePacific Insight: TeleCommunications Blog

If you’ve read Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you recognize “Begin with the end in mind” as one of those well-regarded habits. It prompts you to set personal and professional vision and goals and work toward that end. All fine and dandy, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re taking a less philosophical and more practical approach to the subject. Begin with the end in mind…as you’re planning your company’s future, what happens when an unexpected disaster or business-halting event happens? We’re not talking post-apocalyptic, meteor plummeting toward the earth, test-tube dinosaurs escaping from their theme park to wreck havoc, Arizona becoming beach-front property type of problem. We’re referring to less geographic-altering earthquakes, fires, electrical outages, burst water pipes and nasty computer viruses.

Do you have a business continuity plan to make sure that when something like that happens, it’s not the end of your business? I know that it may sound intimidating…heck, even the term “business continuity plan” sounds elaborate and complex…but it’s not that difficult and it’s truly a business-saving precaution.

Here are a few tips to get you started on your business continuity plan:

• Put together a team ahead of time and clearly delineate what their tasks, roles and responsibilities would be following a disaster.
• Have an alternate work site ready in case your current facilities aren’t usable. If you have a small business, this could be your home or garage. There are also companies that provide workspace, computers and supplies to clients who have been displaced by disasters.
• Make sure that all your data is being backed up and stored, on a regular basis, in a remote facility. If something happens to your building or equipment, you need to know that your data is safe and restorable to a location not affected by your local events.
• Talk to your suppliers and critical business partners to see if they have a business continuity plan, and be sure to include them in yours. If a disaster happens, you want to ensure that your suppliers and partners can still meet their obligations to you and that, if needed, they are flexible and can reroute goods or services to your new location.
• Test your plan. Create a scenario and play it out to confirm that everyone knows what to do, that your systems work, that your data is restored where you need it to go and that there are no weaknesses in your plan.

Okay, so perhaps it is a little more difficult than I was making it sound. But you’re not alone. While you probably can’t camp out in and run your business out of our lobby after a disaster, TelePacific is more than happy to help prepare for one. Services like our RemoteStor, which backs up all your data nightly in our Las Vegas facilities; Network Redundancy, which provides back-up systems in case your primary ones fail; and Remote Access to Call Forwarding, which lets you redirect your phone lines to any phone you need to, make it easier to get started on a business continuity plan. And the excellent TelePacific customer service just might brighten your day, whether or not things are going well.

Our team is very experienced with helping customers with their business continuity plans, so we know the issues and concerns as well as the best technology to set up now for peace of mind later. Whether you’re an existing customer or not, give us a call today to talk a little about preparedness…calling us might not make it to the list of habits of highly effective people, but it will definitely help keep you effective following a disaster.