What happens when disaster strikes, and your primary office space becomes unavailable? Does your business continuity plan include backup seating or workspace for key employees? The spread of the COVID-19 virus has driven masses of office employees to work from home. But for many workers, that isn’t always feasible, particularly for employees who handle sensitive data or follow stringent security requirements. Your business continuity plan needs to include backup workspace for these employees. A business continuity plan is a roadmap for ensuring that your company can keep operating even if your primary equipment and office space are unavailable.
What is business continuity workspace?
Business continuity workspace is off-site seating or suites used when access to your primary workspace is unavailable. For example, you may have seating in a third-party provider’s data center.
Business continuity workspace in a provider’s data center
Fortunately, data center providers – good ones – will almost always have resilient, disaster-rated infrastructure and robust security for both the building and IT systems.
A data center is normally designed to withstand disasters common to its area. It’s also equipped with redundant equipment to ensure that if one network connection or power source fails, another one can take over. This includes utility transformers, multiple power distribution units (PDUs), and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), multiple power feeds from two or more electrical substations, and redundant cooling units. Look for carrier neutral facilities with many network carrier connections. These are more stable and fault tolerant. Ask how long of a power outage the facility can survive, what disasters it’s rated for, and the type of fire suppression equipment it has.
Business continuity workspace is a key element of your disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Because not all employees can, or should, work from home, you need to have business continuity workspace ready to ensure that your business can continue operations within a day or two of a major disaster.
There are many companies that provide temporary offices and workspace, but your disaster recovery or colocation provider is often the best bet. A data center provider will be able to ensure optimum security, IT resilience, and the convenience of having your IT systems and workspace managed by the same company, often at the same location. At Whitelabel ITSolutions, we provide short-term business continuity workspace services. Contact us to learn more about how it works and pricing.
