3 Tips to Flawless Business Continuity this Winter

At its best, the winter brings snow-topped trees and rolling white hills primed for sledging, at its worst, well… look no further than this picture:

The winter season can be detrimental for business. This is why there’s no Silicon Valley in Siberia and why there’s no Fortune 500 headquartered in Alaska. Winter weather can cause outages, risk to infrastructure/services, loss of connectivity and travel disruption. To quote Shakespeare’s King Lear, “This cold will make us all to fools and madmen”. So without further ado, here are the top 3 tips to flawless business continuity this winter.

1. Remote Working

Here’s the plausible scenario. Snow, ice, frost. There are a ton of reasons why getting to the office can be dangerous or impossible. Is your business enabled with remote working solutions? In case bad weather causes severe travel disruption or danger at your business location, remote working solutions enable your staff a single, unified work platform accessible from any device and any location.

Here, collaboration becomes easy. Utilising Cloud services like Microsoft 365 and SharePoint – you can provide better team cohesion and performance across geographies, giving your teams the ability to collaborate in real-time on projects from multiple locations and keep productivity hot when the weather is cold.

2. Hosted Telephony

The cold wave, dubbed The Beast from the East, is set to return in 2019. Last year, this Scandinavian anticyclone caused weeks of disruption and even 16 weather-related deaths. If your office becomes uninhabitable and fit for the next season of The Walking Dead, you need longer term solutions.

One such solution is hosted telephony. As the severity of the weather increases, these vulnerable and old-fashioned structures are the first to suffer, bringing your business down with them. With hosted telephony, your phone systems are brought to the Cloud, safe and undamaged regardless of the weather.

3. Emergency Contacts

Keeping good communication is essential for every business, especially if anything threatens your business continuity. Knowing your SLAs, who to contact and what the procedures are can go along way for personal well-being and overall productivity.

I love the winter. There’s great food, the football season, warm Netflix nights; remember – winter is the precursor to spring. So, you can use it as a platform to start a great year.

If you want to know more about business continuity plans, reach out to one of our experts at Timico. Stay safe, and stay successful.