1 Aug Why The “Always On” Culture Favours Resilient Businesses

As any cursory internet search will show, professionals today are subject to what is described as an “always-on” business culture: we’re constantly accessible through our smartphones and tablets, constantly connected to our professional networks and, for many of us, constantly keeping business at the forefront of our minds outside of standard working hours.

It’s unrelenting, it’s demanding and it’s a natural by-product of a hyper-connected business world that, courtesy of exponential technological and digital advancements, never quite shuts off.

The impacts are even greater for businesses though.

For today’s businesses, every second counts, and the “always-on” business culture presents significant risks to profits, and a unique opportunity to carve out a new competitive advantage.

The True Cost of Downtime

When the business world never shuts off, the effects of power outages and downtime are exponentially magnified. Take Amazon for instance, who are estimated to havepotentially lost £4 million ($5.7 million) in sales due to their homepage being down for 49 minutes in 2013.

This is not an isolated case either.

2011 saw Blackberry makers Research in Motion lose around £38 million ($54 million) as a result of a four day outage that caused customers to lose access to their data.

It is not only B2C or technology firms that share this vulnerability however. From UK DNOs to a modest Italian coffee shop, every company has assets that are vulnerable to disruption, whether in the form of natural disasters, economic reform or any other source of uncertainty.

Whether these assets are hardware, software, intellectual property or people based – they are central to business continuity and the ability to effectively satisfy customers and clients. Coupled with a business and consumer culture that never switches off, this reliance on assets functioning without disruption is all the more pronounced.

This vulnerability does however, present smart businesses with a unique opportunity to develop a competitive advantage.

The Benefits of Asset Resilience

In an uncertain world where the number of global data breaches has increased to its highest level in over 10 years and where floods in the UK caused two of the EU’s largest insured losses in 2015, resilient businesses that take a preemptive approach to risk reduction and asset protection are the ones best positioned to thrive.

This is because resilient businesses actively plan for the events that cause unexpected downtime. It’s not just preventative planning either, it’s also maintenance planning and perhaps most importantly, the planning of the exact steps required to both mitigate collateral damage and get assets back up and running as quickly as possible post-disaster. This is particularly important because, as any London Tube strike will demonstrate, the longer it takes to regain business continuity, the more capital is needlessly lost.

For resilient businesses, this is great news.

If one thing is certain, it is that disruptive events will one day occur.  What this means is that your competitors will at some point also be faced with similar disruption and the associated costs. In such instances, resilient businesses will lose considerably less capital (and trust) than their non-resilient competitors that have not devised a plan to bounce back quickly and effectively.

As a result, all businesses need to begin building resilience into their assets, processes, infrastructures and supply chains to create an additional competitive advantage.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote: “businesses that fail to plan, plan to fail”, and today’s “always-on” business culture means the price of failure just became more expensive for those that don’t adopt resilience thinking.

To take the first steps toward a becoming a more resilient business, or to find out more about our specialist DNO Asset  Resilience solutions, click here.

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn as a Pulse post.