Collaboration Resilience: 4 Key Elements of Business Continuity Amid Disaster

Despite years of effort and billions of dollars invested in business continuity, cybersecurity threats and other business disruptions (like natural disasters) continue to grow in both size and complexity. Such an incident exposes an organization to the possibility of negative reputational risk, loss of customers, and increasingly, significant fines and penalties.

For that reason, business continuity planning is a must for the modern enterprise, and one of the most important areas to address is communication. A business must maintain both internal communication with staff and external communication with customers and other stakeholders, which is easily done with the right collaboration resilience solution. To that end, here are four key factors to ensure success:

1. Ease of Use

In the event of a disruption, the last thing a team needs is more confusion arising from an overly complex, hard-to-understand collaboration resilience solution. The best communication continuity solutions feature ease of navigation and intuitive user dashboards so no time is wasted — particularly during the stressful and confusing first minutes and hours of the interruption. 

2. Training

One way to guarantee success is to make sure that the team is well-trained in how your collaboration resilience solution works. However, both the IT team and operations personnel have limited time and resources to devote to this activity so it must be as efficient and brief as is feasible. Training should be restricted to the lowest number of staff possible but it should also effectively cover all necessary information. 

3. Preparedness

Establishing a collaboration resilience program is not a “set it and forget it” type of exercise. In order to ensure that communication channels will work in the event of a disruption, it is important to establish and maintain a regular series of mock events. Like training, mock events should minimize the impact on business, IT, and operations staff while simultaneously being robust and impactful. 

4. Adaptation and Learning

A collaboration resilience solution is not a “one size fits all” program either so it must be tailored to meet the specific needs of the enterprise. Additionally, lessons learned from mock events should be used to improve procedures, incorporate new technologies when appropriate, and adapt to shifting business requirements. To do so, the solution needs to be well thought through and architected to enable change and enhancement.

The Real World Need for Collaboration Resilience 

In the face of the very real threat of business disruption, preparedness is essential. An important first step is to make sure that communication is reestablished as quickly and completely as possible. With that, the extent of damage can be assessed, team members can resume their normal functions, and customers can be reassured and have their business needs met. In short, collaboration resilience is an absolute necessity and should be addressed as a fundamental part of any business continuity plan.

Maven Wave Partners, an Atos Company, has extensive experience in developing and deploying collaboration resilience solutions across a number of industries — including financial services and healthcare. To learn more about how collaboration resilience applies to your enterprise, click here and download our latest white paper “Communication in a Crisis: A New Approach for Business Continuity”.