Maintaining Business Continuity With ECM During the 2020 Hurricane Season
IntelliChief, the leader in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, urges businesses to prepare for the upcoming 2020 hurricane season in order to maintain business continuity and ensure the protection of all business-critical data.
According to The Weather Company, an IBM business, “The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season is predicted to be more active than usual.”
Dr. Todd Crawford, the chief meteorologist at The Weather Company, estimates that there will be a total of 18 named storms in 2020, including nine hurricanes and four major hurricanes. If this forecast is accurate, the 2020 hurricane season will trump the 30-year average, which class for 13 named storms per year.
For any business, maintaining operational data protection is a crucial aspect of business continuity. Without access to information, a business cannot flourish. When information is destroyed without a digital copy to fill in the gaps, it can lead to significant challenges for an enterprise-class business. Needless to say, with the 2020 hurricane season looming on the horizon, disaster recovery and business continuity have come clearly into focus, leading to questions like:
- Can you afford downtime?
- How long can you survive when revenue skids to a halt?
- If your business can’t serve its customers, will they immediately jump ship for a competitor, or are you secure in your niche?
- What is the cost to restore operations versus the cost to safeguard against future disasters and disruptions?
Although COVID-19 has pushed organizations to address business continuity weaknesses, Mercer reports that only 24 percent of companies are currently drafting a plan and 51 percent have no plan at all. These companies have been rendered vulnerable to force majeure events that nobody can control, and this vulnerability will only continue to be exposed as the first wave of tropical storms and hurricanes sweep the Atlantic.
Another issue is the scope of a disaster recovery or mitigation plan. Commonly, companies have a disaster recovery plan that doesn’t include the preservation of information outside of their on-location and colocation servers. In other words, data stored on your employees’ personal devices, disparate systems, and even information on paper is a high risk for permanent information elimination.
An ECM solution can help mitigate risk by elevating a company’s ability to maintain business continuity. ECM integrates with ERPs and line of business systems, closing the loop on data indexing, real-time verification, and validation of information across all applications and databases. During disaster recovery, it provides a centralized hub that your staff can access from any location, allowing them to continue working with systems they are familiar with outside of the office.
ECM also provides a daily operational benefit in the form of real-time captures and data validation. It even provides interdepartmental process workflow automation and analytics. As an enterprise-class solution, it can be utilized across your organization in Accounts Payable, Order Processing, Finance, Purchasing, Sales Management, Customer Service, Human Resources, IT, Legal, Logistics/Distribution, and more.