How Well are You Sustaining Business Continuity?

When many people think about business continuity, the topic of disaster recovery often comes up. However, true business continuity and sustained employee productivity requires planning for both big and small events which could affect your organization’s ability to conduct business and service customers.

Even small interruptions can have a big impact on business continuity. One study estimates that unscheduled employee absences from work cost companies around $3,600 a year per hourly employee and roughly $2,650 per year for salaried employees. When you consider how easy it is for an employee to unexpectedly not make it into work the issue of business continuity takes on a whole new light.

There are many small events that could affect business continuity that virtual desktop solutions can solve for, helping you maintain continuity and employee productivity.

Inclement weather

Bad weather, particularly snow storms, can easily keep employees from making it into the office – sometimes for multiple days. If they didn’t bring their laptop home, or if they don’t have a dedicated work computer (as with contact center employees for instance) a day or more of productivity is gone. Alternatively, bad weather could affect the office – knocking out power or making it otherwise inaccessible.

By having a virtual desktop solution like desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) in place, employees can still access all the necessary applications and data to continue working at home. All they need is a home computer (or a secure end point device and the supporting peripherals), electricity and an internet connection.

Office Issues

Bad weather isn’t the only thing that can take an office offline. Power and internet outages, building emergencies like a burst pipe, or even the roads around your office being inaccessible can all effect employees’ ability to work at the office and impacts your entire on-site workforce.

Even in the case of an “office disaster,” you need to maintain high levels of customer support and ensure rapid-response functions continue.  With accessible DaaS, your entire staff can still get online and work with access to the same programs and information.

Employee Turnover

The loss of productivity caused by replacing an employee is clear. A new employee needs to be trained and will take a while to reach full productivity potential. But have you ever considered how time consuming turnover is for your IT department?

When an employee leaves, IT has to pause other projects to wipe the employee’s device and ensure their access to any applications, particularly SaaS based applications, is revoked. If the employee was remote and was issued hardware, IT may spend even more time just trying to get the company-owned hardware back. IT then needs to service and provision a device for the new employee, ensuring it has all the necessary applications and controls in place for that particularly worker. So not only is the productivity of the vacant role interrupted, but IT’s productivity is also effected.

With DaaS, it’s as simple as wiping a virtual desktop and revoking a single user login. When a new employee is hired, IT can quickly and easily spin up a fresh desktop configured to spec by using the appropriate golden image. Provisioning a desktop for a contractor or temp employee is just as easy, helping to maintain continuity during the gap.

Consider Your Desktops

Clearly, it doesn’t take a hacker or a server crash to disrupt business continuity, even small hiccups can have major productivity effects. This is a particular risk for service-oriented employees as any down time can have a significant impact on responsiveness and customer service functions. Revisit your business continuity and disaster recovery plan to ensure it covers desktop DR so that you have a viable solution in place for both big and small challenges.