14/11/26, Authored by Mark Neunzerling, Director of Technotic Limited
In a single day, an estimated tens of thousands of New Zealand businesses discovered just how much they rely on email
When their main communication channel goes down, most small and medium businesses aren't prepared to switch to a second one, either for talking to each other or for talking to their customers.
A communications outage hits every kind of business. Professional firms lose productivity. Service businesses struggle to deliver what their customers pay for. Trades can carry on with some work, but it's not just admin that piles up. Safety information travels by email too: hazard updates, site changes, job instructions. When it doesn't reach the people who need it, "we were fine" stops being true.
In short, the effects of a long outage last well beyond the outage itself.
Businesses with a disaster plan that included a second communication channel, such as a support desk, a notice board or a customer portal where people could find information, weathered the storm better than most.
Lesson 1: Have a second way to communicate
A second line of communication lets your business get information to the people looking for it, even when email is down.
Examples include:
- A professional phone system
- A website with a live chat function
- A notices page on your website
- A customer portal
The key is that your backup must not depend on the thing that failed. During the outage, we kept our customers updated through a page on our own website, which doesn't rely on Microsoft.
Lesson 2: Plan your disaster response
A disaster response plan is more than the IT team deciding how to recover from a cyber incident. It's a plan for how your business keeps operating, as far as possible, when any one key part of its infrastructure is out of action.
The first step is identifying what those key parts are. Go through each of your business workflows and ask: "What is our plan to keep things moving if this step can't be done the normal way?"
Once you have a plan, the next step is to make it part of staff training, and to keep the workaround procedures somewhere your team can reach them, including when your main systems are down.
This outage tested our own planning too, and showed us where it needs work. Over the coming weeks we'll be sitting down with each of our customers to build a Plan B for the next one. If you'd like help with yours, get in touch.
