Reading: How to secure business continuity and establish remote working

Scott Dodds, CEO, Ultima, explains what your options are and how quickly you can establish robust business continuity.

Today’s business continuity challenges are likely to be making you ramp up remote working plans to an unprecedented level. Your organisation is going to require that all staff remain connected and productive over the coming months. At speed and at scale, this is no mean feat for most IT teams.

It’s a process that we are familiar with, and as a Reading-based business, we are poised to help Thames Valley businesses through these difficult times. We have already gone through our own rigorous business continuity assessment and testing to ensure we can operate all our systems and processes remotely. We are ready to help you through this process too and share our knowledge.

So what are your options to keep your business going?

Managed service providers and technology companies know the barriers and challenges that come with deploying and operating workloads in the cloud; that’s why we can help remove them for you. There are now automation services that have been developed to inoculate your business-critical environments immediately. And by immediately, I mean within hours.

Automated remote working via the cloud

Business critical automation technology now allows you to access, low-cost, software driven Cloud DR in three hours, remote working in three days and to operate a fully autonomous datacentre in three weeks. Any problems with your IT can also be handled remotely, and many technology firms are offering up their staff and expertise to help those firms whose IT departments or teams are depleted.

Free collaboration tools

For businesses to stay productive, they need the ability to collaborate seamlessly with colleagues and other contacts. There are several excellent options available, but the good news is, Microsoft has just launched a six-month free trial for commercial customers of Microsoft Teams in CSP, which can be provisioned for up to 1,000 seats so you can deploy it across the entire organisation.

Teams streamlines and brings together all your collaboration tools, including chats, shared files and online meetings into one single app and interface.

Extra IT help when you need it

Similarly to Ultima, many MSPs (managed service partners) have large in-house teams of highly skilled, 3rd line support consultants, senior technical consultants and solutions architects whose skills cover a huge range of infrastructure technology solutions. And they are making these available to businesses in need often at a reduced cost.

Ongoing benefits of an automated cloud

Expensive migration projects are a thing of the past as we can quickly and easily get you working in the cloud. Besides enabling flexible remote working, there are other key benefits too:

Cost savings: Forget looking after and buying hardware, sorting out those power and cooling needs, capital purchases as well as security and networking – it’s all provided for you. Capital expenditure is eliminated with the cloud Opex costing model meaning that you only pay for what you use.

Security: With a sudden increase in home working, many corporate systems will be vulnerable to hackers. Microsoft cloud, for example, is one of the most secure solutions for IT services. This security is offered to you as part of your cloud service, with providers updating their security for you daily.

Guaranteed uptime: The cloud offers most of your critical services at least a 99% uptime guarantee. This is often increased to 99.9% to core areas keeping you online, at the highest rate.

Ongoing management: Naturally, you’ll be worried about costly expertise of managing this new IT environment. MSPs have that covered as well, with highly automated management, monitoring and optimisation managed services. They can look after your environment in the cloud and help you to balance cost vs performance.

Ensuring your business continuity isn’t as difficult as you might at first think. With the right IT partner, you will be up and running in no time and have ongoing support, so your business can focus on continuing to deliver what your customers need.