You’re creating a spreadsheet to track the progress made on the enterprise cloud migration project you’re leading. Then, the worst thing imaginable happens before you hit “Save.”
Your software crashes. To make matters worse, yours is the third to crash in as many months, and now you’re considering switching to a new provider. You’re concerned about wasting money by purchasing too many licenses for your constantly evolving staff, though.
You’re not alone. Research shows that 76% of businesses over-license software to avoid audit-related penalties, but this negatively affects their bottom lines. Fortunately, instant-download software can help you save money by controlling license activation, and creating a software continuity plan, including backup and recovery strategies, can help you avoid software catastrophes in the future. Let’s explore why every tech professional needs a software continuity plan.
No Software Is Fail Proof
Downtime in the workplace is unavoidable, even when your workplace’s tech environment is well-maintained. An outage may occur due to a simple software product failure, and if you don’t have an official plan of action, you and your staff will be forced to react to a chaotic situation. If a critical work platform suddenly goes offline, the lack of a software continuity plan can result in frustrated customers, lost revenue, and interrupted workflows. You may also lose trust and credibility if you appear unprepared and ill-equipped to safeguard the company’s essential systems.
No Part of a Company Goes Unaffected
Today’s companies depend on software to perform almost every function, making the creation of a software continuity plan a must. Your company’s software supports customer management, supply chain management, scheduling, logistics, and more, so a single failure could affect multiple departments. If you don’t create a continuity strategy, your team won’t know what to do to keep the company moving by restoring access and maintaining data integrity.
Cyberattacks Are on the Rise
Digital attacks, such as ransomware, are occurring more frequently and becoming more sophisticated, putting your company’s systems at risk. A strong software continuity plan highlights the following to help you restore operations as rapidly as possible in these situations:
- Recovery steps
- Isolation procedures
- Backup schedules
Failure to create a plan may cause devastating data loss and prolonged downtime, and may even ruin your company’s reputation. You and your tech team may appear reactive rather than strategic, even if you could do nothing to prevent the catastrophe.
Human Errors Are Unavoidable
All humans make mistakes, and these mistakes remain a significant cause of system outages in the workplace. A software continuity strategy can help protect your company in the event of an accidental deletion, flawed deployment, or misconfiguration by providing the following types of guardrails:
- Recovery time goals
- Rollback procedures
- Snapshot policies
These guardrails may help keep tiny errors from growing into large crises, forcing you to rebuild a system manually under extreme pressure.
Compliance Standards Demand Continuity
Perhaps your company operates in an industry such as government, healthcare, or finance. These industries are increasingly requiring organizations to document continuity strategies to remain compliant. A software continuity strategy demonstrates that your organization can continue safeguarding sensitive data and remain operational even in the event of a disruption. Not creating a detailed plan may help you avoid losing contracts, failing audits, or incurring fines for failing to practice technological due diligence.
Remote Teams Rely on Continuity
Let’s say your company has staff members distributed across the country or the globe. These team members likely rely on cloud-based tools. If they lose access to a project management system, a code repository, or a communication platform, their work would come to a screeching halt. They may become idle, exceed deadlines, and lose productivity. A strategic continuity plan can help ensure your workers across time zones have backup channels for communication and continuing their work.
Software Vendors Can Be Affected, Too
What happens if your company experiences a vendor-related disruption that threatens your ability to keep operating? The vendor you rely on for support, update distribution, license verification, and activation servers may suddenly discontinue a product, experience a significant outage, alter licensing rules, or stop operating altogether. If you don’t have a continuity plan, you’ll have to scramble at the last minute to resolve the loss of your software product. A solid plan outlines fallback workflows and alternative tools so that your company can keep moving forward when a software vendor does the unexpected.
Planning Fuels Smooth Knowledge Transfer
A well-thought-out software continuity plan can ensure knowledge about your systems is transferred to other employees when key workers leave. After purchasing software for enterprises, organizations often depend on just one or a couple of experts to handle system configuration, backup storage, license management, and recovery from failures. If these employees suddenly become unavailable, retire, or resign, their companies may instantly lose invaluable system knowledge. A continuity strategy prevents this by making sure everyone in your organization is equipped to operate software and keep systems running when a turnover-related disruption occurs.
Create a Software Continuity Plan to Protect Your Organization Today
Developing software continuity plans is vital for tech professionals seeking to keep their organizations running efficiently when software-related disruptions occur. A continuity plan is critical because software can fail, and this can negatively impact just about every department within a company. A continuity plan is especially important for companies with remote workforces. Consider all the above-listed reasons for creating a continuity plan as you seek to protect your company’s technological operations long term.
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