It's Time to Rethink Operational Resilience for Remote Work

Operationalresilience allows companies to keep operating in the face of a failurescenario, including loss of facilities, loss of network providers, naturaldisasters like hurricanes or wildfires, and yes, global pandemics.

The arrivalof COVID-19 launched these business continuity plans into operation, and inmany cases, even the best-laid plans were developed considerably on the fly tocope with full lockdown. However, with so many working remotely now and for theforeseeable future, it's worth revisiting your business continuity approach forpotential gaps.

Operationalresilience and COVID-19

Thoseinvolved in operational resilience planning know it requires us to anticipateand adapt to these types of events. The pandemic scenario was always aplausible one, and cloud services are playing a major role in supporting plansthat foresaw distribution and segregation of workforces.

Respondingto the pandemic required activating remote work continuity plans, includingscaling up VPN bandwidth, deploying new desktop video applications and remotingcall centre agents, to name a few. Many companies were able to adapt and arenow fully dependent on their remote workforce.

Butoperational resilience is often fluid, and optimizing our business continuityplans through the lens of COVID-19 requires fresh thinking.

At thebasic level, it's worth considering whether key staff working from home havethe type of resilience that you would expect. For instance, do they havemultiple network connectivity options, resilient power and the capability ofremote staff to triage and deploy alternates?

Beyond themost basic resilience needs, it's important to consider how reactions to thepandemic may have created new single points of failure.

Mitigatingcommunication risks

COVID-19drove the adoption of video usage from the desktop. In response, somebusinesses have simply extended their existing productivity software toincorporate newly developed video features.

Thisapproach has created a single point of failure for critical communications. Ifit fails, that could pose a huge problem. Previously, the responding teamswould co-locate to mitigate the loss of command and control mechanisms likecommunications. However, this approach is no longer available while staff areat home.

That's whycompanies need to rethink business communications to enable continuity forremote workers even if your interlinked software stack fails.

If yourproductivity hub includes critical collaboration features like email and filesharing, having your video communications solution live separately from thatmakes sense from a business continuity standpoint. Zoom integrates well withleading collaboration platforms, yet exists in a separate ecosystem. Even ifZoom is not your selected video product, it can act as a business continuityoption for crisis command and control.

Having Zoomas a supported option facilitates your staff to operate in a multivideo world,where clients and partners may have different solutions for video interaction.And you can have peace of mind knowing that as a CIO, you can manage youremployees' use of Zoom.

To learn more about all the ways Zoom helpsbring teams together to collaborate in a frictionless video environment, visit CDW.ca/Zoom.