Laptop Business Continuity

Laptop Business Continuity

Your connection and communication with your team are what drives your business The nature of modern business and collaboration means that you’re constantly connected with your team, and rely on rapid communications and seamless business continuity no matter where you are in the world. While there are often a robust variety of tools at your fingertips to ensure reliable business continuity in your office, in modern business, you’re not always in your office.

As your staff and executive staff travel, they need to stay connected with their team. Company mobile devices are a common way to ensure that your personnel can stay connected while they travel and don’t have to decide between productivity and making that meeting. With company laptops and phones, your team stays together even when they’re apart. What happens though when one of those company devices gets lost or damaged with critical data on it though? Business continuity can’t be just limited to the office, and you need to make sure that the data on your mobile devices is protected to prevent costly setbacks and challenges.

What is business continuity?

Business continuity refers to your company’s ability to continue the core of your operations, even when certain hardware is inaccessible or systems are offline. Business continuity needs to be an inter-departmental undertaking in your entire company to ensure that you can still conduct business the way you need to regardless of the unplanned hardships that life may throw your way.

Your organization probably has some level of business continuity mechanisms in place in the office, whether they be backup servers or offsite infrastructure to ensure you can count on 100% uptime for your network. These redundancies often prove unnecessary when all goes according to plan, but are critical insurance against the often costly repercussions from productive time lost without needed tools, or data loss of critical information.

We often think about backing up servers and ensuring network consistency when it comes to business continuity, but often your key people like senior staff and executives are out traveling, far from your servers. This blind spot in most business continuity plans can get exposed pretty quickly when someone misplaces a laptop with critical data or resources saved on the laptop instead of a backed-up folder.

The common tools to achieve business continuity

There are no sophisticated and innovative secrets to healthy business continuity. In today’s business environment, most organizations will simply want to rely on robust systems of backup storage, shared storage, and backup infrastructure to achieve their desired level of business continuity.

The key to cultivating a healthy level of business continuity within your organization is that you need to be prepared for anything. While many businesses may at least somewhat have a plan to conduct business through unplanned network outages or natural disasters, many will neglect to consider the many unplanned variables that can come from mobile devices on business travel.

Why do you need a solution for laptop business continuity?

Travel introduces a lot of possibilities for plans to go wrong, yet often companies won’t consider how offsite devices could seriously harm business continuity. If an executive is traveling with a laptop, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong. Business travel can be hectic and with frequent work back and forth between a phone and a laptop, a company device could easily get misplaced. Luggage can be switched and devices are one of the first things that thieves may target.

If that executive loses their laptop, can they still get the work done that was important enough to travel for? Will they still be able to fulfill all their functions while traveling, or will the business be disrupted? You also have to think about all the critical data and resources that could have been on that laptop.

Many companies’ solution is to give a cloud storage folder or similar solution to each device. This does seem like a positive step at face value, but you’re relying a lot on one individual person to save essential items to cloud storage every time instead of the device. It’s not a sound solution if one case of human error could bring the entire plan off the rails.

Mobile business continuity is essential

Healthy mobile business continuity solutions are inherently just good business continuity solutions in general. If a natural disaster forced you out of your office unexpectedly, your entire team may suddenly feel like the executive above. Many organizations have cultivated ecosystems where they treat offsite devices no different from any computer in the office as far as the ability to restore, back up data, and remotely access. You may not need to go this far to ensure that your business’s critical systems can always continue, but if losing one computer– in the office or out– seriously disrupts your business, you need a better solution.

Business continuity isn’t just about hardware and data. If your entire company were unable to get to your office for the next week, how would they do business? The executive who lost their laptop is essentially in the same situation– his mobile office is unavailable. Business continuity also involves ensuring that there is a way to access your critical systems and conduct business in any foreseeable disaster. Having a way for your team to access essential tools as a backup not only ensures that the executive can find a way to continue their work just as much as that the core of your business can still continue if a disaster forces you out of your office.

Protect your assets

Mobile workstations are a valuable part of your IT infrastructure, and often they’re traveling with some of the people doing some of the most critical work in the organization. You need just as robust solutions for device management, business continuity, and data encryption as you’d have for any machine at the top levels of your company.

Here at Colorado Computer Support, we’ve been helping to make sure companies have robust systems for mobile device management and IT services like data backup for over 20 years. If you have any questions about how to ensure that your mobile workstations, as well as your servers, have the business continuity solutions that they need contact us today