How Unified Communications Aids Business Continuity

Business disruptions can occur anytime. For this reason, most organisations have disaster recovery and business continuity plans. A good business continuity plan should also outline how you’ll communicate with your organisation’s stakeholders. During an emergency, the efficiency with which you interact with relevant stakeholders determines how quickly you’ll resume normal operations. 

Unified Communications (UC) can shore up your organisation’s disaster recovery and business continuity strategy. When all communication channels get integrated into one platform, it will be easier for the management and employees to share and convey information during a disaster. Here’s why UC is vital to your organization’s business continuity plan. 

Communication is Your Lifeline During Emergencies

In the aftermath of a disaster, communication is more critical than at any other time. UC comes in handy during such scenarios because it integrates all your communications platforms. This is particularly beneficial to organizations with distributed communication architecture, far-flung employees, and remote offices. 

If you’re facing a data breach that renders email communication impossible, for instance, you can seamlessly switch to telephone communication. Similarly, if voice communication is unavailable or unreliable, employees can easily switch to instant messaging. You may also use presence functionality to reach out to individual employees who are working remotely. 

Video apps can be used to access the damage caused by the incident so that mitigation measures can be taken. This way, there will be minimal disruption to your operations. Therefore, UC helps you minimize the impact of a disaster on your organisation. 

Enables You to Communicate Without Disruptions

The ability to receive and relay information during a disaster determines how fast you’ll recover from it. UC allows you to communicate efficiently, even when critical systems are performing below par. Without communicating with stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and even government agencies, each passing minute represents more lost revenue, and worse still, reputational harm to your organization. 

It Helps You Prevent Misinformation

How you recover from a disaster is significantly determined by the accuracy of the information that you send out. Thanks to UC, all the information that you send out during an emergency will be coming from one verified source. This goes a long way in preventing the misinformation and chaos that follows most disasters. 

Integrating UC into your business continuity plan in advance helps you to identify what might be needed in case of a disaster. This enables you to make adequate preparations early, so when the actual disruption occurs, you’ll be able to handle it correctly without losing time. 

When planning for disruptions, UC will help you to incorporate critical things such as key contacts, communication templates, and procedures on when and how to share information with relevant parties. Keep in mind that the end goal of integrating all your communication channels is to ensure that information us easily accessible and that it can be passed across efficiently when even during a disruption. 

When it comes to disaster recovery planning, you should think of UC as a strategy for garnering and distributing information to relevant parties via channels that are convenient to them. It helps you to establish how to disseminate accurate information to the right people through the most appropriate platforms. This way, additional problems that may arise from misinformation will be avoided. 

Key Takeaways

A good business continuity plan should encompass a unified communications strategy. In the aftermath of a disruption, UC will ensure that relevant parties are kept informed about the what, where, and when the incident occurred, the severity of the problem, and mitigation measures put in place. 

Do you want to learn more about Essential Tech’s unified communications solutions and how they can help you recover from business disruptions? Book a free 30-minute consultation with our experts to get started.