Longer Disruptions Shift Business Critical Priorities to Mission Critical

Business continuity plans are being adjusted to reflect longer-term scenarios; virtual desktops using Teradici Cloud Access Software on Microsoft Azure or Azure Stack deployments can solve a number of challenges in supporting remote workforces.

It’s fair to say that for many organizations, the prospect of a global pandemic was not the scenario their business continuity plans were built for. When we hear the word “disaster,” we tend to imagine sudden catastrophic events – earthquakes, floods, accidents, or perhaps data breaches. And yet here we are. More than six months after closing our head office, we at Teradici, like many of you, are mostly still working remotely from home, with plans to continue to do so for at least several more months. We’re not alone. A recent survey of U.S. companies who had planned to resume office-based work after Labor Day showed that more than half were reconsidering.

With this new reality, many organizations have found themselves reassessing their business continuity priorities. Typically in a planning scenario, it’s common to categorize some functions, systems and applications as “mission critical,” that is, crucial to the immediate continued operations of the business, and some as “business critical,” which designates them as important to the long-term health of the business but able to withstand temporary disruption with minimal consequence in the short term.

As we adjust to the long-term nature of the current situation, the lines between mission critical and business critical have shifted, particularly if an organization’s planning scenarios focused on short-term disruptions with clear endpoints and relatively quick recovery. The same thing has happened in our personal lives – as the months have gone by, many of us who started off working from our dining room tables have shifted our own priorities to setting up separate work spaces with proper office chairs as our backs (and in some cases our relationships) were tested by our “temporary” contingency plans.

Perhaps your business continuity plan included providing virtual desktops or workstations for mission critical functions, and you assumed that other team members could make do temporarily by using personal devices to access web-based applications through portals. As time goes on, that patchwork may have worn thin – employees tire of its clumsiness, onboarding new team members is difficult, and productivity suffers as what was supposed to be a temporary workaround with compromised performance (not to mention security) goes on too long. In effect, the longer business continues to be disrupted, the more the lines blur and business critical functions begin to shift to mission critical.

Our friends over at Microsoft have been thinking about this as well. At Microsoft Ignite 2020 we witnessed an influx of information, case studies, and product initiatives to help businesses gain efficiency and resilience by using Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack to centralize and manage virtual desktops and workstations for remote work scenarios.

Teradici Cloud Access Software offers a flexible, secure, and high-performing complement to Azure and Azure Stack deployments that has proven invaluable in both day-to-day operations and as part of a business continuity strategy. If you’re looking for some examples of how organizations have benefited from Teradici solutions as part of their Azure deployments, here are a few to get you started:

• A global creative company was able to expand its freelance pool and reduce its operational costs by replacing physical workstations in the studio with virtual workstations on Azure and using Teradici Cloud Access Software. When the pandemic hit, the company was able to maintain operations from their artists' homes with minimal disruption.
• An investment management firm was able to migrate its applications to Azure and convert its infrastructure costs to predictable monthly operational expenses that were easier to manage and allocate, while maintaining compliance with strict industry security requirements.
• Jellyfish Pictures saved approximately $100,000 in server costs and countless hours of artists time by moving production to Azure, and it strengthened its security in the process.