How to build resilience into your business IT for 2021

No matter what your business situation was in 2020, all entrepreneurs are currently asking the tough questions about 2021: What does it take for politicians and scientists to find common ground when it comes to the pandemic? When will people be able to go on with their lives? How are employees ever supposed to go back to the office?

Answers to these questions are not easy to find, and the uncertainty is making many CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs cautious when it comes to IT spending for the next 12-24 months. However, there are a subset of businesses already thinking beyond the post-pandemic IT questions because of one simple reason: They built their corporate IT for resilience.

What IT resilience is and why your business needs it

Businesses with a resilient IT strategy could provide IT services to employees even when faced with challenges to their normal operations—such as a global pandemic where everyone is forced to stay home. For those businesses with resilient IT, a city lockdown resulting in an entire office having to work from home overnight didn’t throw the CIO and his already-overworked team into crisis mode. Resilience doesn’t mean your business is immune from problems; it means you can easily bounce back from inevitable business disruptions. In our increasingly connected and always-on world, IT resilience is the key to navigating through operational ambiguity.

Steps your business can take to achieve IT resilience

Building IT resilience into your company is a strategic move that all entrepreneurs should consider. Amaxra consultants helped numerous businesses build resilience into their IT over the past few years based on Microsoft technologies and services. Even before the 2020 pandemic, Amaxra was deploying business solutions and processes enabling IT resilience for our customers. As such, Amaxra consultants recommend these four things every business can do to built up their IT resilience:

1. Migrate to the cloud: In the past five years, cloud computing has become mainstream for businesses. Multiple industry analyst firms, from 451 Research to Gartner, note that over 90% of all companies use two or more cloud-based IT solutions. While many mid-to-large enterprises leverage software as a service (SaaS) apps such as the Microsoft 365 productivity suite and Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure for the inherent IT agility and cost-saving benefits, few enterprises have moved 100% of all IT and data into the cloud. Amaxra consultants help these businesses to simplify the cloud migration process by taking an inventory for a holistic assessment of your data—including any legal and regulatory issues that must be addressed during a move to the cloud. But the more IT workloads a business can transition to the cloud, the better resilience they can achieve.
2. Empower every employee for remote work: Providing employees with effective ways to do their jobs from home was a challenge in 2020. Many companies are still evolving in response. Amaxra’s response was to convert to a 100% remote workforce starting in the summer of 2020. Crucial to our successful business transition was our early adoption of both the cloud and the Microsoft Teams collaboration solution. In past blog posts, I’ve talked about the multiple ways that Microsoft Teams makes Amaxra and our customers more efficient by enabling collaboration from anywhere and on any device. I’ve also discussed how companies currently using Slack should seriously consider moving to Microsoft Teams (especially now that Salesforce has bought the company).
3. Establish a business continuity plan: Although some companies made infrastructural changes in 2020 related to cloud migration and remote work, those changes can be quickly undone if they haven’t all been followed by appropriate backup and recovery plans. Business continuity plans outline exactly what happens when a natural or human-caused disaster hits a company. For example, Amaxra develops business continuity plans that infuse resilience into an organization using cloud-based solutions to backup corporate data in case of a fire or flood at one or multiple office locations. We also develop strategic business IT resilience plans that can integrate cloud-based solutions such as Microsoft Teams for remote work and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for automated customer support to ensure your business doesn’t lose any business during an operational disruption.

Add cyber-security at every level: Effective management of potential cyber-security threats are critical for business IT resilience. But shifting corporate data to the cloud and employees to remote work has increased the potential attack surfaces for cyber criminals. Every resilient IT organization should take steps to secure cloud-based storage in order to prevent data leakage, consolidate their various SaaS apps to avoid licensing issues, and configure all employees—remote or onsite—to sign into the corporate network using multi-factor authentication… all of which Amaxra builds into every customer’s IT solution from day one.

Deploy Microsoft 365-based solutions for IT resilience

Regardless of where your company is on your journey towards business IT resilience, Amaxra can help. Amaxra is a Gold-level Microsoft Partner with extensive experience in deploying Microsoft 365 solutions. Our consultants will assess your current environment to determine the steps you can take to increase your IT resilience today no matter what tomorrow brings.