What is a Business Continuity Plan and Why Does Your Organization Need One?
Well-managed organizations are not immune to the risk of potential business interruptions and need to pivot and adapt in the face of adversity. However, if the events over the past few years have taught us anything, even the most agile businesses are not prepared for everything. In the event of a catastrophe, the need for a Business Continuity Plan is paramount to keep your organization thriving. However, if your business lacks the proper planning, you could be treading water without a life preserver hoping for a miracle. Let’s talk about business continuity and how your organization can secure its operations.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
Disaster can strike in all shapes and sizes, including acts of nature, malicious attacks/cybercrime, or data failure. A Business Continuity Plan outlines how a business will proceed during and following a disaster. This plan ensures that all aspects of a business are accounted for, including the workplace, communications, servers and networks, applications, and other resources maintained by the organization.
When disaster strikes, is your business protected?
Not having a plan in place can put your business at risk. When disaster does strike, there are several questions your organization should be able to answer to guarantee a smooth recovery:
How long will it take to get back up and running?
Whether you anticipate it to be one week or several months, ensure your IT team creates a timeline to restore all services needed to operate business as usual.
Do you have a backup plan if systems are compromised or damaged?
It is always a good idea to devise a replication roadmap in case your primary network, sites and systems are inaccessible.
Are employees still able to communicate efficiently internally and with clients?
In case of disaster, communication among employees as well as with clients is critical. Adopting a unified communications solution as well as a a cloud based email, such as Microsoft 365, can help all employees seamlessly collaborate no matter where they are located.
Can you support your entire company to work remotely if the physical office closes?
This is a question that many organizations struggled with in 2020 and those organizations that could easily provide employees with resources to do their jobs outside of the office were most successful. Ask yourself, is your infrastructure able to provide employees with a laptop and an internet connection to perform their jobs effectvely? Do you have a VPN established to securely protect company data on potential public networks?
Do you have business applications deployed?
It is always a good idea to migrate critical business applications onto a backup server to seamlessly integrate with your new roadmap after an unprecedented event.
According to the latest PWC Global Crisis Survey, as many as 95 percent of business leaders report that their crisis management capabilities need improvement. And, with Gartner estimating that downtime can cost $5,600 per minute and as much as $540,000 per hour in more extreme scenarios, having a rigid Business Continuity Plan to deal with difficult situations can help your organization function with as little disruption as possible.
Adopting a Business Continuity Plan is critical to ensure your organization's operations are not severely impacted by a disaster or unprecedented incident. A Managed IT partner can help your organization discover the easiest and most affordable way to prevent the permanent loss of your information and rapidly restore your data. Once your organization develops a turnkey business continuity solution, it will be better equipped to protect its data and people, minimize unplanned downtime, and restore business processes.
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| Sharp Author | Louis Costantini |