Ensure Business Continuity with Office 365

Office 365 has been recognised as the number one cloud business application among enterprises. In a series of blog posts we’re going to identify the reasons so many businesses are choosing Office 365, beginning with business continuity.

Released in 2011, Office 365 was developed to meet the growing needs of businesses. As Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, stated, “That’s why Microsoft has set a bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business process in this mobile-first, cloud-first world.” By utilising cloud technology Microsoft enabled businesses to do more, allowing them to provide a continuous level of service in-line with what their customers demanded.

In order to continue providing a high level service, and one that is available 24/7, businesses must minimise the potential for disasters. Disruptions and disasters can have a catastrophic effect on a business, costing hundreds, even thousands of pounds. By addressing the issues that hinder business continuity or disrupt usual working practices and processes, you can ensure that your business remains agile and competitive.

Business as Usual

Office 365 provides a range of tools that are accessible via the cloud including, Exchange online, Sharepoint, Skype for business, along with the familiar Office desktop applications. Therefore users can rest assured that Office 365 will allow them to continue to work should disaster strike, providing:

• Access – In the event of a disaster, access to essential documents, emails, contacts and calendars, is vital to the survival of your business. This is due to the fact that 70% of those who experience a major fire, for example, resulting in significant downtime go out of business within five years. However, users of Office 365 can continue to work as normal with remote and mobile access.
• Uptime – Not only does Office 365 provide the means to minimise disruption and downtime, it also has a 99.9% guaranteed uptime. Business continuity may not be Microsoft’s primary focus, however, as explained on TechNet, “Service continuity provisions are part of the Office 365 system design. These provisions enable Office 365 to recover quickly from unexpected events such as hardware or application failure, data corruption, or other incidents that affect users. These service continuity solutions also apply during catastrophic outages…”
• Resilience – Office 365 provides five layers of security to protect your business data. This type of high level security is inaccessible to those whose systems are all still on-premise. As Kelly Sheridan explains on InformationWeek.com, “Built-in Data Loss Prevention cuts the risk of leaking sensitive data and multifactor authentication helps ensure secure access outside the corporate network.” This minimises potential disruption, protects against data theft and disaster.” Added to this, it’s been stated that, “60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months.”

Could your business benefit from using Office 365?

If you answer “no” to any of the questions below you should consider Office 365:

• If disaster strikes, do you have alternative means of accessing vital business documents, emails and calendars?
• Can you access your business systems via mobile and tablet devices?
• Are your systems and data protected by a variety of high level security measures?

More about Office 365…