Simply put, business continuity is the ability to keep doing business even when critical systems fail.
Even small businesses need this. If you work from home and your internet goes out, what's your backup plan?
For me personally, I have two different fibre links at home from two different providers, so even if one link goes down, I can carry on working like nothing happened.
This affects businesses of every level. It might not be your internet that's vulnerable, but what happens if your laptop crashes? Do you have a reliable backup of your data? How quickly can you get back up and running on a new laptop?
The larger the business, the more complex this gets, of course. If you're a company of 50 employees and you lose connectivity in the office, you have some real problems. No email, no phones - basically, your office comes to a grinding halt. What if the server crashes?
Here's a harsh truth: everything breaks eventually. Your internet will go out. Your laptop will crash. The server will crash. Your VoIP provider will have an outage. Tech services aren't flawless.
Honestly though, as someone who's run an ISP for the last 13 years and understands the inner workings of the Internet, I'm amazed and surprised every day that any of it works at all.
So it's worthwhile, whether you're a small or large business, to look at what's likely to fail and how you can mitigate it.
Here are a couple of things that I see often in the IT space that I would suggest some kind of redundancy for:
1- Internet
If you're a solopreneur, having some kind of backup is helpful. You don't have to go full-on with two fibre links like I do, but you can have an LTE backup (hotspot on your phone) or a separate LTE/5G router, though that usually comes with a subscription. You could also just take your laptop to a coffee shop and work there for a few hours while your home internet is fixed.
If you're a larger business in an office, consider at the very least an LTE/5G failover option. It won't be the quality of your office fibre, but it will give you some connectivity so at least you're not dead in the water. If you're a larger office and your business would be severely impacted, having two fibre links with automatic failover is an absolute must.
2- Servers/Apps
This is more an issue for companies. Some businesses have specific apps they use to run their business. Might be accounts, might be CRM, or in the case of one of our legal clients, they have a very specific application that manages all their legal contracts.
Where does this app live? On a server in a cupboard in your office? Right, what happens when that server has a moment and the power supply dies, and it takes three days to get a new one?
I'm generally against any kind of on-premises equipment, specifically for this reason, but if you have to have it, then get some kind of backup computer that can run the app for a few days while you sort it out.
Ideally though, you want to move this to a cloud server and choose a cloud provider that will provide failover or real-time backup, which will minimize downtime.
This is less of an issue for one-person businesses. As a solopreneur or even very small team, you likely just use online services, so you don't have to worry about redundancy. For instance, we use Xero for accounting - we just pay the monthly subscription, and they take care of everything. Even Ghost, which hosts this website - we just pay monthly and get on with it.
3- Hardware
While it's not possible to have a spare computer for every user in the office, if you're a Mac shop, setting up cloud backups for every user means you could have one spare machine which can be used by any user if their machine breaks.
If you're a Windows shop, then using Microsoft 365 means your data essentially lives in the cloud, and you can log in on any Windows laptop and carry on working.
For the one-person band, this gets a little more complicated. It's not feasible to have another expensive machine on standby. But you have a few options; here's what I do:
Firstly, I make sure I can do 90% of what I need on my phone - yes, I invest in a decent phone. I'm a Mac user, and I've set up my iPhone so that pretty much everything syncs, and I can do almost everything from it.
I've been in a situation where I was without my Mac for a week, and while a bit painful, I could do everything important on my iPhone. An iPad would do pretty much the same but be even more efficient.
If you have a partner who has a computer like yours (Mac or Windows), you could set up a profile on their machine and use it when they aren't. I've done this too, using my wife's Mac.
Those are the three areas of tech that fail the most. What level of redundancy and business continuity you implement will vary depending on the size of your enterprise.
But one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that you WILL at some point run into some of these issues, and you will need to have a plan for when it does happen.