Natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and snowstorms often restrict, if not put a complete halt on, business operations – many times without warning. These outages and disruptions result in millions of dollars in cleanup and lost business. Natural disasters matched with the myriad of cyberthreats, data breaches, human error and hardware malfunction only add to the possibility that a business will experience some type of costly outage or disruption.

According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. Using this figure, what is the impact of a disruption on your business if down for an hour, day, or even a week? Whatever the number, it validates the need to have a business continuity plan. Every business should have one, regardless of their size.

Disaster recovery and business continuity are often thought to be synonymous. As a provider of private cloud solutions, my company’s mantra is “business continuity, not disaster recovery,” as there is a difference.

Disaster recovery focuses on the IT infrastructure of an organization, providing a plan to recover from an outage. Business continuity, on the other hand, focuses on ensuring the entire organization is running at full capacity even when an outage occurs.

Business continuity does not have to be complex, nor should it burn a hole in your IT budget. Standby virtual desktops offer a sensible alternative to maintaining and updating physical desktop computer infrastructures – at a fraction of the cost.

Leveraging Cloud-Hosted Desktops

As the IT landscape continues to evolve, traditional desktops considered as part of a business continuity plan are no longer a viable option for organizations. Not only are they costly and extremely maintenance-heavy, they cannot fully support the changing business requirements, especially with respect to security.

By moving to standby virtual desktops via a private cloud environment, enterprises can quickly realize all the benefits of centralized management, enhanced data security and simplified deployment without the steep costs, restrictions or inconveniences.

Remote access is also supported to aid business continuity initiatives and mitigate the risk of downtime. Standby virtual desktops are pre-configured and always ready to perform – even when your office facilities are not. This ensures your employees do not miss a beat as they are able to remain “business as usual” during an outage.

Benefits of a True Virtual Infrastructure

Complications associated with designing, enforcing and supporting virtual desktops are a thing of the past. Cloud-hosted virtual desktops come preconfigured and provide the capability to be implemented seamlessly, ready to go at a moment’s notice. This approach reduces the cost traditionally associated with physical desktop maintenance and can minimize the need for technical expertise.

Employees are no longer tethered to any physical device, location or internet connection. Users are provided the capability to start working in one location on one device and seamlessly pick back up where they left off from any device or location; enabling the mobility and flexibility organizations require, without hindering performance, security or compliance.

By taking advantage of standby virtual desktops, organizations are equipped with a proper business continuity solution before an outage or cyberthreat looks to compromise business operations. When disaster strikes, will you and your organization be ready?