Today, with the reliance on technology to underpin business transactions, combined with the increasing threat of cyber-attacks, viruses, power outages and natural disasters, a business continuity plan is more important than ever.
While many organisations do have a plan, it’s common to overlook managed mobility services as an essential part of their plan.
This is a missed opportunity, and one that could prove costly. These days, managed mobility is vital in keeping your business running during a crisis.
When you include managed mobility as part of your business continuity plan, you take your plan to a whole new level, greatly reducing the risk of any downtime or disruption to your services.
Managed Mobility for Uninterrupted Communication
If your IT system is disrupted, a good continuity plan makes the difference between keeping the business up and running or coping with consequences (lost revenue, lost productivity, and reputation damage) of extended downtime. And while it makes sense to give serious thought to backups and off-site storage to protect your data and enable system recovery, the same applies to mobility management. Make no mistake, managing your communications and mobility in a crisis is absolutely critical.
In a disaster situation, you’ll need access to:
- Reliable communication channels
- Critical business systems
- Other data and information.
In the days before pervasive mobile technology, it was not uncommon for organisations to purchase a second, stand-by phone system, sometimes kept at an off-site location, as a back-up in case of system failure.
Thankfully, this costly exercise is no longer necessary. Mobility is now a core part of almost every business – and with the right continuity plan, your mobility assets can also act as this back up.
Managed Mobility to Keep You Connected
A well-managed fleet of mobile devices in tandem with careful planning can keep everyone in your organisation connected. This includes during a cyber-attack, systems disruptions and in some cases even in natural disaster situations.
Most importantly, if your business is using a managed mobility service, you minimise the risk of losing access to your critical information at your physical location. This allows your team to resolve a crisis or keep your employees informed and make the right decisions.
With escalating cybersecurity threats, it pays to have a mobility management solution in place. According to Gartner, 50% of public Wi-Fi networks are not legally compliant and are vulnerable to attack. So, imagine an employee is targeted for a man-in-the-middle attack on a mobile device. The hacker uploads a zero-day virus through a vulnerability in your systems which takes down your CRM, invoicing and many other critical business systems. Your people are offline and every minute is costing you money.
But not if your continuity plan included managed mobility. With mobile threat management and remediation failover to backup systems is ensured, and even prevents the zero-day code vulnerability upload in the first place.
Managed Mobility for Continuity
Effective enterprise mobility management will keep your team operational during an emergency. With an increasing reliance on mobility in business, and ever-increasing numbers of devices, it can be a real challenge to manage the growing number of mobile endpoints. It’s a major reason why more organisations are outsourcing their mobility to a managed mobility service provider.
There are numerous ways managed mobility helps your organisation function better on a day-to-day basis, but many business owners are now realising the benefits of including managed mobility in their business continuity plans too.
Does your organisation have a business continuity plan? And is managed mobility part of it? We’d love to hear your comments below.
Original post: 29 August 2018
