In the daily commotion of running an effective business, continuity and disaster recovery can be overlooked. Often times, businesses don’t appreciate the benefit of having a disaster recovery plan implemented until the catastrophe strikes. With managed business continuity planning, you can ensure the integrity of your business’ information no matter what.
Even a commonplace issue like experiencing a power surge can end up leading to expensive network outages. These can cost your business a lot of lost resources in terms of time and money. This needn’t happen however. With a business continuity plan, we can help you to reduce loss from unplanned downtime.
How to Make an Effective Business Continuity Plan
To have effective business continuity policy, it must be deployed comprehensively across the entire organization. This is the biggest difference between business continuity and disaster recovery. In disaster recovery, we are mostly concerned about the reversal of lost data. With business continuity management, we also take care of the externalities and contingencies of your business. This is called a business continuity plan.
Business continuity planning examples would be sitting down and developing a checklist on how to keep every aspect of your business running, even through a critical event. This would involve ensuring that each mission-critical device has been properly backed up in a safe location such as the cloud. It would include ensuring surge protection and redundant power to these devices. It would also include having a dedicated after-hours support for such situations.
Most Business’ Don’t Have a Business Continuity Plan
It has been demonstrated that nearly 40% of SMBs never fully recover from an unexpected catastrophe. Numerous things can lead to experiencing a critical event – anything from human error to weather events, electrical outages, fires, to ransomware and hacking. In recent times, threats like ransomware and viruses have become the norm rather than the exception.
Avoid being the next victim by ensuring that your business has implemented a robust business continuity plan.
Preserve More Than Data – Your Social Image!
Being the victim of a well-orchestrated ransomware attack or other hacking attack does not reflect well on anyone. Future clients might be deterred from working with a business which has been the successful target of hacking. Keeping your public image squeaky clean is another benefit of having a business continuity plan. Trust is important – be sure to maintain it.
Stakeholders and employees alike can be impacted through the loss of profits. Keep the people you are responsible for happy, and secure in their incomes with business continuity management.
Insurance Doesn’t Cover Data Breaches
Although your physical gear might be covered by insurance policies, data is often in a kind of grey area. Many insurance brokers do not cover the loss of data – especially when it is caused by data breaches, backup issues, hardware failure, and hacking. Even in the case that the data is insured, it can be hard to determine the value of this data, and you will never actually get it back.
The only sure way to deal with critical events is through Business Continuity Management. Cyberattacks and data breaches effect everyone, and when they happen, they are devastating. Maximize uptime, security, and public trust with business continuity planning.
Business Continuity Takes a Team
Creating an effective business continuity plan requires teamwork and comprehensive planning. Every situation is unique, and you must be able to accommodate all of them. To ensure this, every BCP should include the following pillars:
Structure and Hierarchy
To solidify the integrity of your data and operations, you must also solidify the structure of your organization. There has to be well-defined organizational structure and hierarchy. This facilitates quick decision making in a disaster recovery or business continuity situation.
We pay attention to securing all the core and peripheral components and individuals in your facilities. From the IT to HR to executives and accountants. Everybody needs to be trained in the best security practices and other relevant knowledge.
A Well-Defined Plan
The difference between an effective and ineffective BCP is in the planning and accounting of potential issues. Missing even a few crucial elements and not planning for their management could cascade into something much larger. There should be redundant mechanisms in place to take care of all the worst-case outliers.
Updating the plan continually and reassessing its effectiveness are also crucial. The topology of your company will change throughout the years. Making sure that the BCP is still even relevant should be done consistently.
Thorough Testing
Having a plan is merely theoretical. We believe that you should put theory into action by performing tests. The team responsible for your BCP should conduct drills to ensure effective communication and response. Recording the details and improving continually ensures that the BCP is actionable.
Communication Throughout the Organization
Preparing for a disaster through pre-developed communication channels is also crucial. The contact information of all contacts involved in the BCP process should be maintained and shared. Documentation should be written up beforehand so that swift transmission of information is facilitated.
This will greatly speed up your organization’s response time to a catastrophe. During these times, mere minutes can mean years of lost trust and time.
Training the Workforce
If the workforce is unaware of these procedures of course, they will not do much good. Ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to business continuity management. This will reduce the amount of panic and chaos which usually transpires in a critical situation.
Keeping everyone calm and working together will ensure that the operations are seamlessly transitioned. Drills and training are the only way to do this.
Business Continuity Planning with Livelinx
When tragedy strikes, it can be devastating to the current and future operations of your business. There are far too many threats to absolutely avoid them all. Instead, plan for these events and reinforce yourself, become more resilient.
We can help you do this through cloud-based business continuity plans. Save your productivity, cash flow, and also hard-gained trust through a meaningful business continuity plan, from a trusted MSP such as Livelinx.