What’s the most disastrous thing that could happen to your business? If you’ve answered anything other than a catastrophic failure of your computer infrastructure, then you’re probably quite an optimistic person. Yes, it’s impossible. Computers can fail just like any other hardware device, be it by a malicious hand or due to wear and tear. This is why it’s important to plan for continuity in business. The ability to continue working should your main computer infrastructure collapse will ensure that you don’t lose customers and that you still have a business to return to once your computers are fixed.

But how do you do so? What steps do you have to take to ensure your business can continue operating even after a catastrophic failure? Here’s what to do.

Switch to cloud services immediately

Unless you want to dig out the remains of your customer data and important files, then make sure you backup your data on a cloud service or an off-site backup solution right away. Make sure that you do backups every half a day or day at the minimum, and ensure your internet connection is stable enough to transfer all the files and customer data with ease.

Should your networked hard drives fail, you’ll be able to recover the data with ease by using your cloud-based backup, or by accessing your off-site server. This can get complicated when your network uses multiple different operating systems, but there are cross-platform disaster recovery options available to almost every business. As long as you plan ahead, you’ll never be met with a surprise you can’t overcome.

Enable remote working

If you operate a company that makes heavy use of technology, then you can also make use of remote working. This essentially means that you can have employees working no matter where they are. This means they’ll need a laptop or a similar device in power. It also means you’ll need to make extensive use of cloud services, be it cloud storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive, or Google Docs and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Being able to work remotely means that if a computer fails, your staff can continue working from home or on their personal laptop workstations, making it a seamless transfer that doesn’t hinder business operations. As an added bonus, it also gives them an opportunity to do some work at home even if they call in sick.

Have a plan of action ready

You won’t need to practice drills, but it does help to have a plan in place that you execute when your business suffers from tech failures. For instance, maybe you have backup computers ready to bring out and set up for when your main ones fail, or perhaps you have extra keyboards and mice to use. You also want to inform employees what happens should the main servers fail.

This is to ensure that all of your employees, be they software developers, the marketing team or accountants, have no excuse to be lazy at work even when the business is going through a rough period of tech issues.