Why make smartphone business continuity software? Because the smartphone is an easy-to-use tool that’s growing in use by leaps and bounds – already an estimated 450 million smartphone owners in 2011 among literally billions of mobile phone users – and it fits in your pocket. When that fire alarm goes off, it’s a lot easier to grab your smartphone as you head for the emergency exit, than scrabbling to find paper manuals or grappling with your notebook PC. But standardising on smartphones as a BC tool also means answering the following questions: can you rely on people to have their smartphones when disaster strikes? And what in particular do smartphones bring to business continuity that other computing devices cannot?
There is a classic Sherlock Holmes short story in which the detective tricks someone into revealing an item of great importance by making the person panic in a fire alarm. His theory, as explained to Doctor Watson, is that in such moments of stress, people will instinctively seek to save what they value the most. In today’s business environment, smartphones are such an integral part of many people’s lives that they couldn’t even imagine being separated from them for an instant. For this reason, smartphone business continuity software can be accessible to them anytime, anywhere.
MIRA (Mobile Incident Response Application) from OpsCentre has been designed with this in mind, using the computing power and main memory storage of smartphones that today rival those of PCs. Notwithstanding the other data that people keep on them, there is typically more than enough power available for smartphone business continuity software to run as well. OpsCentre’s MIRA also makes the most of a number of features that are only available in smartphone platforms and not in PCs or tablets, such as SMS messaging to contact people immediately, and GPS for locating them wherever they are.