While good planning and processes are at the heart of business continuity and disaster recovery, technology can accelerate the benefits as well. We live in an age of cloud computing and smartphones. Both can be used to help an organisation get back on its feet after incidents, or simply ride them out without severe or permanent consequences.
Mobile Apps. With a billion smartphones in the world, the mobile app is now a familiar concept. The MIRA smartphone app makes use of the extensive capabilities of mobile devices to communicate with and localise respondents in order to coordinate DR and BC processes and exchange crucial information.
DR Planning Software. Well-designed software applications provide centralised resources and management for disaster recovery planners. They can apply proven methods, modify the plan according to changes in the organisation and manage access and approval.
Crisis Communications. In bigger events or disasters, it becomes more important to maintain effective two-way communications with larger numbers of people. Notification and DR Planning Systems offers conference call bridging, message centres and escalation of communications by priority of contacts – all functions that can help an organisation get through pandemics, floods, fires or storms with the least adverse effects possible.
Server Virtualisation. If a disaster can be prevented in the first place, that’s even better. Virtualization of servers means that software programs, data and processing loads can be shared over several servers, all ready to take over or fill in if one particular server crashes. VMware is a leader in this domain.
There are many more technology solutions to help make an organisation more resilient and to help it recover from outages. Software applications exist for business continuity planning and cloud backup, encryption and restore solutions for secure data storage. In the future we’re likely to see yet more sophisticated technology, increasingly better at preventing disaster situations as well as resolving them. However, while the technology may be impressive, what counts in all cases is still the real business benefit that you get out of it.