How the Cloud Helps in a Natural Disaster
Many of today’s companies are reeling after a series of natural disasters swept the nation. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma did significant damage to many areas, making it impossible for those businesses to operate normally. Whether your business is in the middle of a flood zone and you’re looking for ways to make the entire process easier next time or you’re simply worried about overall disaster preparedness and how to protect your company in the event of any type of natural disaster, moving to the cloud can offer several advantages for your company.
Get Back Up from Anywhere
When you run your servers, backup, and desktop as a cloud service, you can bring your business back up to full operational capacity no matter where your employees are located. This means that you can create a secondary operations center following a natural disaster, get your employees back to work even if your primary place of business is shut down completely, and keep your business running smoothly even when Mother Nature appears to have turned against you. Following a natural disaster, one of your primary concerns is getting your business back up and running. The more time you spend unable to operate, the more money you’ll lose–not just immediately, but long-term, as customers take their business elsewhere in an effort to find companies that are better prepared to weather natural disasters. With cloud services, on the other hand, you’ll be able to get your company back up and running no matter where your employees are located.
Keep Customer Service Running
In many cases, following a natural disaster, your company will struggle to access vital data–or at least, it would if your data was stored in a building that was destroyed or that is inaccessible due to downed power lines, flooded streets, or other problems. Fortunately, your customer service doesn’t have to depend on the condition of your building. With cloud services, you can:
- Have immediate access to all of you data, including customer records
- Keep customers informed about everything the company is doing to protect them, their funds, and the products or services that they’re waiting for
- Be proactive about contacting customers in the wake of the disaster
- Know as much about your customers as you were if you were sitting in your office
It’s interesting how customers will respond in the event of a natural disaster. Some of them focus on inconsequential things in an effort to take their minds off of the greater scope of the damage done throughout the disaster–and if that inconsequential thing happens to be an order from your business or a service that they need to postpone until they’re able to return home, you want to be able to soothe their anxieties and let them know that your company will continue to take care of their needs.
Cloud services allow you to continue providing the excellent customer service that your business is known for–and that means that customers will not only keep their trust in you, they’ll increase it! Customers are looking for businesses that are willing to go above and beyond in order to ensure that their needs are met. Staying fully functional following a natural disaster lets your customers know that they can count on you no matter what might happen around them–and that means that they’ll be more likely to bring you their business in the future.
Get Your Business Running Again Faster
Following a natural disaster, your physical place of business may be in shambles. You can’t guarantee what equipment will still be functional, whether the building was ravaged by fire, flood, or tornado. Thanks to cloud technology, however, it doesn’t matter what equipment is still functional–or even if you’ll have to go out and purchase new equipment to fill in the gaps in your ability to operate smoothly. You can reinstate your business’s functionality immediately, without any need to wait for your facility to be back to normal operational capacity. This means that you’ll be functional again much faster: you won’t have to wait for the facility to be restored or data reloaded from your backups, just find a machine that will allow you to access the cloud and log in.
Keep Your Data
The sinking feeling in your gut as you survey the damage done by a natural disaster is hard to get past. You know that your business–like the rest of your area–is going to be a long time in recovering. One of the biggest losses for many businesses, however, isn’t in the physical items that were destroyed. It’s in the data! When you use cloud-based servers, backups, and desktops, however, you don’t have to worry about data disappearing along with everything else in the middle of a natural disaster. You might lose your business’s physical location, but you won’t lose your data along with it–and that means a lot of advantages for your company.
Allow Employees to Work Remotely with Full Productivity
During a natural disaster, especially one with plenty of forewarning (as in the case of Hurricane Irma), your employees may quickly scatter in an effort to preserve their lives, their families, and as many of their possessions as they’re able to move out on short notice. Those who evacuate the area entirely won’t be able to get in to work under normal circumstances–but if they take a laptop with them or have access to a computer at their destination, they’ll be able to continue working remotely. When you use cloud services instead of storing your data on a local server, you’ll find that your employees can work just as effectively remotely as they can when they’re at the facility in person–and that means that no matter where the natural disaster takes them, they’ll be able to keep working at least part of the time.
Not only that, following a natural disaster, there is no knowing how many of your employees’ homes will be destroyed or how long it will take them to be able to fully return home. While you can’t help them turn their homes from rubble into what they once were, you can provide them with jobs that will allow them to keep working throughout the natural disaster–a serious concern for many hourly employees. Being able to work remotely will also allow your employees to support your business from afar, keeping productivity up and keeping you from losing as much money throughout the recovery process. In some cases, you may even be able to keep doing business throughout the disaster, with only a few breaks in the productivity chain to allow employees to take care of personal responsibilities, evacuate the area, or wait for power to return to their area.
Natural disasters can quickly destroy the area you live in, bring down your building, and leave you scrambling to keep operating at all. They can take your employees out of the area, leave your customers in the midst of a sea of destruction, and provide you with more questions than answers. When you opt for cloud services, however, you can rest assured that the vital data that keeps your company running every day will still be accessible and that your business will be able to continue to provide for your clients’ needs. If you want to learn more about cloud services or you’re ready to make the transition to the cloud, contact us today to learn how we can help.
