Plan, Align, Adapt: The Importance of Business Continuity Management

Optimize collaboration and emergency response with a system designed for agility.

What does it mean to practice business continuity management? A BCM program helps your organization stay the course during incidents, preserving your operations and reputation. BCM relies on clear communication and reliable access to your company’s critical information and assets.

Disasters can be natural, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or floods. Or they can be man-made, like IT systems failures.

As a secure information management hub, a document management system (DMS) is an integral part of a BCM strategy. A DMS gives you centralized access to company documents, disaster recovery protection, compliance support, and more.

Imagine a manufacturing company experiencing a ransomware attack against their systems. Thanks to their DMS, they could quickly restore critical files from secure backups and maintain production schedules, avoiding weeks of downtime.

From training staff about cybersecurity to risk awareness and crisis response, your DMS is a platform to keep your business running smoothly and minimize disruptions during issues.

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Unify your preparedness efforts

Business continuity management depends on how quickly and effectively your team can respond when a crisis strikes. 

Emergencies can require a coordinated response between different departments and offices. First, you need access to the right information. A DMS facilitates better collaboration by allowing multiple users to access and work on documents simultaneously. This keeps everyone informed and operating with the most current information. 

Synchronizing efforts means you’ll avoid delays and task overlap. By enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of emergency response with a DMS, you can mitigate the overall impact of incidents, potentially reducing the cost of recovery.

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Simplify data protection and disaster recovery with integrated tools

One of the most common threats modern businesses face relates to cybersecurity. You rely on employees, contractors, and third parties like vendors to take care when working with your non-public data to prevent inadvertently leaking this information.

Automated backups and secure cloud hosting help you safeguard your data. With DocuXplorer, you’re not only equipped with professional installation and automatic backups but also benefit from a multi-layered hosting strategy. DocuXplorer uses different hosting providers—Azure for hosting and AWS for backups. This means that if one provider experiences an issue, your data remains secure and accessible via the other.

With DocuXplorer’s backup services, you never have to worry about your hard drive crashing. Complete with professional installation and automatic backups, our backup service is available whether your data is hosted on-premises or in the cloud.

‍DocuXplorer's Private Cloud Hosting secures your data on its own dedicated system. We assign a designated cloud server architect to monitor your cloud server every day and ensure it's up to date and backed up with our secure backup service.

Control who can see what

In a time of strict data protection regulations, companies are accountable for who and how their information is stored and accessed.

A secure system like DocuXplorer reduces internal mistakes, sabotage, and accidental data alteration. It ensures data integrity and makes it easy to report on your security posture. Easily retrieve, share, and update essential files like training documents, issue response plans, and company policies—all in one platform.

With DocuXplorer, everything is trackable, auditable, and recoverable, whether you're addressing simple user errors, natural disasters, or malicious data breaches. This level of transparency and control keeps your business compliant, secure, and prepared for any situation.

Business continuity by industry or department

Here are a few examples of how BCM and a document management system (DMS) can protect operations and drive resilience during a crisis:

• Accounting: Imagine an IT failure during an audit. Without access to financial records, deadlines could be missed, risking non-compliance. A DMS with built-in access controls and quick retrieval capabilities allows teams to continue reporting and meeting deadlines, even in the face of technical issues.
• Healthcare Providers: In hurricane-prone regions, healthcare providers risk losing access to critical patient records during natural disasters. With a DMS, these records are securely stored and accessible via the cloud, ensuring uninterrupted patient care regardless of physical office conditions.
• Legal: Unexpected office closures or system failures can disrupt legal operations, causing you to miss deadlines or lose track of files. With a DMS, legal teams can securely access and collaborate on contracts from anywhere, ensuring you maintain client trust.
• Government Agencies: During emergencies like cyberattacks, government agencies must maintain access to critical public records and internal documents. A DMS keeps these records securely stored, easily retrievable, and protected from unauthorized access, allowing agencies to deliver essential services without interruption.

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Don't forget retention policies and compliance

Maintaining a sound and legally compliant environment is essential for business continuity management. Compliance dictates how your company information and assets are handled. 

Regardless of industry, retention policies help businesses manage their data lifecycle, ensuring critical documents are available when needed and securely disposed of when no longer required. Well-structured retention policies also help you prevent document clutter, improve efficiency, and reduce storage costs.

In some cases, you must delete documents after a certain number of years, or you have to keep them indefinitely. With a company retention policy in place, you’ll have a person or system keeping track of the regulations, ensuring company info is tracked, updated, archived, or destroyed at the right time.

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Stay resilient, stay prepared

When a crisis strikes, business continuity and disaster recovery depend on how quickly and effectively your team can respond. 

With a DMS as part of your business continuity management plan, you’ll have:

• Rapid access to critical information. You’ll locate key documents in seconds to keep your team informed and prepared.
• Built-in backups and recovery. Secure cloud hosting and automated, regular backups protect you against data loss.
• Operational continuity. Your workflows stay intact and accessible, minimizing downtime.
• Efficient collaboration. Everyone will be working with the most up-to-date information, avoiding confusion and delays.

You can set your business up to be agile (and competitive) by proactively monitoring company information so that you’re not only prepared for potential disruptions but you can leverage them as opportunities.

During critical moments, DocuXplorer is your partner in protecting and streamlining business operations. DocuXplorer’s robust data-handling and scalability mean no matter your business size, your data is protected, and the system adapts to changing needs.

Protect your brand from risks, deliver to customers as promised, and reduce the cost of recovery with a system built for any challenge.