We are coming out of this pandemic. We are on the tentative cusp of returning to work and beating the coronavirus, C19. The virus that affected humans and led to the loss of so many lives and battered our businesses.
All is soon to be well in the world again. Or is it?
In one of my other articles, I mentioned that NOW is the time to prepare for the NEXT disaster by preparing a business continuity management plan. Scoff though you may.
I am sure many of you will now think that you have nailed remote working now. You have revised your plans (or ways of working without a plan) so much so that next time, if there is a next time, (and there will be – it is inevitable in a joined-up world) you will be so better prepared for a lockdown.
Bravo.
But you have prepared for another human virus and another lockdown and another self-isolation haven’t you? You have revised operational strategies and methodologies to be able to work from home.
You have put all your work online, got VoIP phones, used SharePoint, installed Teams or Zoom etc and then some. You are sorted because everything is online and you can work wherever you need to be, whether that is in the home or office or Barnard Castle.
BUT pause there for a second. Everything is now online right?
You have moved from reliance on paper to reliance on the cloud?
Let’s pause there for a second, remember WannaCry? The ransomware that affected so many computers and even the NHS – putting lives at risk? We are continually faced with malicious people creating ransomware, trojans, worms and other nasties that try to hack into our online world on a daily basis. You can even go online and see how many attacks are taking place in real-time at any given time. It’s shocking how many there are. Hundreds of them.
Now, post C19, you are fully online, so you are more vulnerable to attack.
The press has documented just how much the hackers are having a go at trying to cause us online harm by attacking the computers of those who are not accustomed to working from home or have little IT experience. I won't go into that more here as a consequence.
If there is another massive computer virus – not human virus – then you and I will be very vulnerable as a business. Those Luddites who remained steadfastly paper-based will be fine.
So, online focussed businesses are fine in a biological virus attack and paper focussed businesses are fine in a computer virus attack.
So, the moral of the story is to be fine in both scenarios. Do go paper-free and fully online to protect you from the next biological attack. But also stay paper-based to protect you from a computer virus attack.
We as a Group do both (and yes it is a pain) – we have a paper-based system as a redundancy to the online operational processes that we have employed and an online system as a redundancy to the paper-based operational processes. One mirrors the other. They are copies of each other.
Be ready for the next computer virus attack and be ready also for the next human virus attack.
Can you afford not to?
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