Continuity Planning 101: A Continuing Educational Series

2010 protection payments are due now.

Protection money is the term for extorting money from legitimate businesses by means of threats or coercion. The concept is simple – pay up and your business will remain safe. Unfortunately, fires, floods and other natural disasters cannot be paid off. The intelligent “pay off” is to implement a business continuity plan.

An extortion threat forces an immediate decision. Silent threats such as future fires or floods are easily ignored, but the following facts may persuade you to make a decision now. Studies show that 40 to 50 percent of businesses never reopen or fail within 12 to 24 months after experiencing a major disaster. Studies also demonstrate that a BCP can actually increase profitability over time. In other words, you can pay protection money and get it back with interest.

Today, most BCP solutions incorporate components that improve efficiency plus save time and money. For example, unified messaging improves business productivity by combining various technologies such as voicemail, email, fax, video messaging and SMS into an integrated solution with storage in one system. The end result is improved workflow and an enhanced user experience. Incorporating virtualization with UM will provide added redundancy plus trim energy consumption by reducing hardware requirements – another example of how going green can improve the bottom line.

If you need to get your 2010 BCP in operation quickly, managed services, software-as-a-service, hosted voice and fax are all examples of solutions that have short times to deployment. These outsourced services are green technologies and can assist companies in complying with HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley and other government regulations. Improved workforce mobility is an added bonus. IT

Early 2010 plan adjustments may be necessary, so put ITEXPO (News - Alert) East from Jan. 20 to 22 in Miami on your calendar to see the latest in IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions.

Max Schroeder is the senior vice president of FaxCore (News - Alert) Inc. (www.faxcore.com) and managing director of the DPCF.

Rich Tehrani is CEO and group editor-in-chief at TMC (News - Alert) and is conference chairman of ITEXPO.

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