It only takes a few Google searches to become terrified by the cost of business downtime. Companies may lose as much as $5,600 per minute, according to one leading analysis, when their IT resources become unavailable — and that’s assuming that the organization is able to recover from the disruption in a reasonable period of time. If the disruption lasts too long, you may find yourself going out of business entirely.
This is part of the reason why cloud desktop platforms like DesktopReady are so valuable to modern businesses. By allowing companies to untether themselves from physical desktops, DesktopReady substantially increases businesses’ ability to work through events that disrupt their physical desktop infrastructure, even if they can’t afford to invest in other types of business continuity solutions.
Threats to business continuity
Business continuity refers to a business’s ability to continue operating in the face of a disruption to the systems that normally power it.
Business continuity may come under threat in a variety of ways. Electrical outages or natural disasters could temporarily or permanently disable the PCs and servers within a company’s office. A cyberattack could render critical business data or applications inaccessible. An employee could accidentally delete essential data or take systems offline.
It’s impossible to predict all of the threats to business continuity that you may face. You also can’t know when they might strike.
Planning for business continuity
You can, however, take steps to plan to protect business continuity against whichever disruptions may emerge.
There are a variety of processes and resources that go into business continuity planning. They range from writing “playbooks” that specify how your business will react to different types of disruptions, to building backup systems that can quickly replace those destroyed by a disaster. Some companies even outsource business continuity planning to agencies that specialize in this field.
Depending on the needs of your business, and how many resources you have available to invest in planning for business continuity, you may or may not opt to take advantage of every business continuity strategy available. Some resources are more expensive than others, and some may be overkill, especially for small and medium-size businesses.
How DesktopReady improves business continuity
One type of resource that will deliver real value for virtually any type of business continuity need, however, is cloud desktops, such as those hosted by DesktopReady.
When you migrate from physical PCs to cloud desktops, you ensure that your business’s critical applications and data will be protected in the cloud, regardless of what happens to any local devices or infrastructure on which your company relies. You don’t need to build backup systems or have a complex restore process in place to rebuild PC environments quickly in the event of a disaster. Your desktop environments and data will remain intact, regardless of what happens locally.
This isn’t to say that DesktopReady provides a total guarantee of business continuity on its own, of course. You will still need to ensure that your employees have devices available to access their cloud desktops in the event that their primary devices become unavailable. However, because DesktopReady environments can be accessed from any device with an Internet connection and a Web browser, the platform makes it much easier to maintain business operations than it would be if your employees depended on desktop environments that are hosted on physical PCs — or, for that matter, if they used virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) running on local servers that may be wiped out during a disaster.
It’s worth noting, too, that DesktopReady provides a range of other advantages, like the centralization of desktop environments in the cloud and a reduction in the amount of work required to maintain physical workstations for your employees. The protection of business continuity is a “bonus” feature that businesses enjoy in addition to all of the other unique functionality of cloud desktops.
And, because DesktopReady hosts its desktops in the Microsoft Azure cloud and professionally manages them, users enjoy a high degree of confidence in the reliability of their underlying cloud desktop infrastructure. The Azure cloud delivers uptime guarantees for virtual machines of up to 99.95 percent, which means the risk of downtime for cloud desktops powered by DesktopReady is extremely small.
Conclusion
Achieving business continuity for your desktops doesn’t have to require expensive investment in backup systems or migration tools that you can use following a disaster. By simply migrating from on-premises PCs to cloud desktops, you gain a high degree of built-in resistance to disruptions, while also enjoying a range of other benefits associated with cloud desktops.
