Business Continuity Is a High-Stakes Strategy
A business continuity strategy enables an enterprise or organization to keep essential operations running if a natural disaster, a network outage, or even a global pandemic occurs.
This blog is part of our series spotlighting our clients and unpacking how disaster recovery cloud solutions help organizations reach their business continuity goals. Here we detail some of the ways LBM Advantage implemented a disaster recovery strategy to ensure their data will be protected against any event. The goal is to resume routine business operations as quickly as possible, as part of a comprehensive disaster preparedness plan.
LBM Advantage, headquartered in Windsor, NY, and with locations in Grand Rapids, MI, Smithfield, NC, and Monroe, LA, is one of the largest buying cooperatives for lumber and building materials in North America. LBM Advantage’s members benefit from a close relationship with vendors and staff of industry experts. Members also turn to LBM Advantage for leadership growth opportunities through conventions and roadshows. Creating a disaster recovery plan required a solution that could be rolled out nationwide for both internal and external players.
LBM Advantage needed to upgrade its infrastructure and find a reliable and secure way to manage, store, and access data. Because its members count on LBM Advantage’s operations to secure the building materials they need within the timeframes outlined in contracts, LBM Advantage also wanted to build a system that would ensure business continuity in the event of natural disasters, cyberattacks, and other situations that could interrupt critical business operations.
LBM Advantage’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan
We worked with the LBM Advantage team to establish an enhanced data protection system in the cloud. This is more than just a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) system. While BDR is a part of the solution, we also recommended that the organization use a system that prioritizes critical data first, so that vital information is quickly accessible, minimizing the restore time objective (RTO). As a part of the project, we also consulted with LBM Advantage to upgrade its multi-site infrastructure and network architecture.
This system gave LBM Advantage the assurance that if a disaster or disruption occurred, its team in the area could establish operations at a new location and access the most vital data immediately to keep operating. Prioritizing business continuity and disaster recovery will help LBM Advantage proactively mitigate risks.
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What We’ve Learned About Business Continuity Planning Through the LBM Advantage Project
When we spoke about the business continuity planning process prior to 2020, companies were most concerned with localized disasters like a fire at a facility, hurricane destruction, tornado, earthquake, or a hardware/communications system failure disrupting business operations.
Today, companies across the country – and around the globe – are aware that illnesses, decentralized workforce, decentralized data, and work-from-home orders can also disrupt business continuity. The pandemic forced people to stay at home, limited the number of people that can work in a facility, and interrupted some services that businesses rely on.
In response, our customers have expanded their disaster recovery planning strategies to include cloud workspaces, known as Desktop as a Service or virtual desktop infrastructure. These cloud workspaces include cloud applications that their employees can access from home to do their jobs. Additionally, they’re transitioning to virtual private server solutions that move infrastructure to the cloud to make it continually accessible and secure, giving a business one centralized “home” for their data and the proper multi-cloud backup and recovery plan to ensure they’re protected from anything.
Overall, the key is to create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan that provides a business or organization with the flexibility it needs to continue operations, even if its employees can’t work on-premises — in some cases, for months at a time. For many companies and organizations, the key to agility and sustainability is the cloud.
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Virtual Systems Can Help You Create a Comprehensive Business Continuity Plan
For many businesses, data is one of your biggest assets. If you’ve done a business impact analysis and found your disaster recovery plans to be lacking, the experts at Virtual Systems can help you develop strategies to enable rapid recovery in the event of potential data disruption or loss.
Improve your business resilience with comprehensive risk management by contacting us today. Our team looks forward to hearing from you!
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