What is Business Continuity?

You've been working round the clock for the past 3 months on the presentation of a lifetime and the night before (it's always the night before) you click 'print' to print it out and suddenly your machine makes a funny noise and then the dreaded black screen appears!

Your computer's hard drive has crashed you are not able to access any information and cannot print out or even get to the presentation that you need for tomorrow!

Unless you have a backup of the file there is little chance of getting the file back in time for the big meeting. Even more importantly is if you are overseas when this happens unless you have been using automatic data backup software you might still not be able to recover the lost file.

That's just one reason why making regular backups of computer information is absolutely vital. Other reasons include flooding, fire, theft, accidentally deleting a file or breaking a machine � there are so many ways to lose data that a quick automatic backup each night helps to alleviate all stress.

If your company relies heavily on the Internet you may wish to look at having a backup connection as there�s nothing more frustrating than the Internet going down and not knowing how long it will be before it's live again. Also for some reason most of the status pages can only be found online which is no good if you haven't got a connection. Using a dongle can offer a quick temporary remedy.

Having the ability to access your key business information from anywhere in the world and from any device including your phone can be useful. Imagine being overseas and you get a call that your office has been broken into. If you can login to a secure area where you�ve stored your Business insurance details, including contact number this will save you so much worry. An online business safe can offer this.

Finally, the provision of a service that allows you to login instantly from anywhere in the world to be in touch with your contacts is so important. Remember the London riots with so many shops vandalised. Owners and managers were contacted who then needed to start calling staff, suppliers, and customers to advise they would be closed. An emergency alert service enables you to quickly login, select a user group and send an alert advising what�s going on. Reminders and updates can continually be sent, alleviating any stresses on managers, workers and customers alike.

Having business continuity solutions in place to keep computer data backed up, alert contacts in an emergency and to quickly access vital information are the most useful business continuity tools a business can put in place to ensure they minimise disruption and downtime as much as possible.