Without even knowing it – before the buzz word was Cloud – the Internet became a utility. As important as electricity for business.
The Internet is the foundation for the largest information resource ever created. The Internet is the conduit of communications. Email, chat, instant message, VoIP, digital voice, Skype and now this called UC (unified communications).
Businesses rely on the Internet to access banking, order supplies, check order status and shopping. More businesses want to sell products and services over the web, like Borders Bookstores as they close brick-and-mortar stores to focus on online stores and e-books. Many businesses have already switched to credit card processing over IP as well as shifting fax orders to a web platform. Social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are primary lead generation streams and marketing mediums.
So many businesses count on applications, software and systems that are not on premise.
As a business owner, if you stopped to think about it, the Internet has become as necessary for your business as electricity without even noticing.
Given this situation, a business continuity plan is necessary to consider what happens if data or applications become unavailable for any reason – outage, security breach, hardware crash, virus or malware, or financial reasons. Recently, the federal government has been closing down hosting companies that may be associated with copyright infridgement (via ICE). In the process, legitimate businesses have been affected.
This is simply a reminder that as a business owner a plan as to how your business would continue to run if your Internet or electricity was down or if your data or applications provider was unavailable.
No one thinks it will happen to them, until it does.
