Five Reasons to Implement/Upgrade Your Business Continuity Plan Now

We are reminded daily of the global economic crisis and budgets are being slashed so who but a fool or a genius would go to the company CFO or CEO and say, “It is critical that we update our Disaster Avoidance/Business Continuity (DABC) plan now.”

At ITEXPO East 2009 in Miami back in February, one of the TMC (News - Alert) University courses was titled, “Business Continuity, Virtualization and FoIP”. Both the course content and contributions by the students provided some solid advice on how to sell business continuity even in this business climate. Maybe these points will help you make your case.

1. Newer virtualization technologies can dramatically reduce the cost of implementing or updating a plan. Products like VMWare and Hyper-V not only make implementing a DABC plan easy, they also allow for consolidation of equipment. The company of one student reduced their servers from 20 units to 4 by going virtual.
2. Business failure – KPMG Risk Advisory Services and Continuity Insights Magazine conducted a 2005 survey that reported 43% of businesses damaged in a disaster close for good. Many businesses are in worse financial shape now than in 2005 so that number would go higher. This threat may scare management into implementing a plan.
3. Regulatory compliance – Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA require data integrity so a DABC plan is critical. Is your company in compliance?
4. Going Green. By incorporating virtualization into your DABC plan, you can reduce power consumption.
5. Saving money. A DABC plan generally builds in mobility and permits employees to work from home or remote offices. Implementing this strategy company-wide immediately can save money now and in the future.

The key to selling in this environment is to sell products that meet a critical need plus save money and the above do both. IT

Max Schroeder (News - Alert) is the Senior Vice President of FaxCore, Inc. (www.faxcore.com) and Managing Director of the DPCF.

Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) is the President and Group Editor-in-Chief at TMC and is Conference Chairman of Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO.

» Internet Telephony Magazine Table of Contents