Use Business Continuity Strategy to Reduce Impact of Disasters
A natural disaster or cyberattack can cripple your business. Learn how to reduce damage and keep your company operational with business continuity planning.
Business continuity planning is an essential component of your company strategy. It’s a process that ensures that in the event of a catastrophic event, your business is prepared to respond rapidly, minimizing the impact and keeping operations online.
What Is Business Continuity Planning?
Business continuity is a planning process that ensures that critical business functions can remain operational in the event of severe disruption. Disruptions may include a natural disaster such as a flood, earthquake, tornado or fire, a cyberattack, a structural failure such as a utility failure, or a supply chain disruption.
Business continuity includes the policies, procedures, internal and external communications protocols, dependencies, and roles employees fill during and after a declared disaster.
In the 2019 Ponemon Institute’s Fourth Annual Study on the Cyber Resilient Organization, those organizations with a high degree of cyber resilience report the following:
- Improved ability to mitigate attacks, risks, and vulnerabilities
- Higher confidence to contain, prevent and detect cyberattacks
- More communication about cyber resilience among senior leadership
- Report streamlined IT infrastructure and less complexity
You can think of business continuity as the contingency planning to ensure that data, systems, and technologies are operational, allowing employees and customers to continue as frequently as possible.
How Does a Company Start Business Continuity Planning?
To begin business continuity planning, your company needs to conduct a comprehensive assessment that identifies and prioritizes data and systems.
This assessment should include a deep understanding of the threats and risks to your technologies, identifying the vulnerabilities inherent with each likely scenario. For example, following a flood or earthquake, your physical work locations may be inaccessible to employees. In a cyberattack, data and networks may be unavailable or compromised.
The threat and risk assessments help you identify the business processes that are essential for your company and help prioritize in the event of a declared incident.
What Staff Roles Are Necessary for Business Continuity Plans?
Your business continuity plan needs to create clarity in what could potentially be a chaotic situation. Defining and communicating staff roles is essential. You need to consider skill sets and leadership abilities and consider moving staff into different positions during a disaster.
What Is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery is a crucial component of business continuity planning. It is the actionable work done after a disaster is declared. It usually involves work to recover critical data and systems, restoring operations and mitigating impact on customers.
Disaster recovery focuses on hitting two key markers, the first of which is a Recovery Time Objective, the amount of time elapsed during which systems can be disrupted without causing undue harm to the business. The second is the Recovery Point Objective, which is the maximum targeted time for lost data transactions during an IT disruption. This figure often helps companies determine data backup schedules.
In disaster recovery, plans and procedures go into effect, as teams and third-party vendors work to restore prioritized data and systems.
What Is Including in Business Continuity Plans?
Along with threat assessments, disaster recovery plans, and personnel roles, business continuity plans often include the following elements:
- Emergency contact information
- Identified essential equipment and services
- Offsite data backups
- Backup power generators or other sources
- An alternate site for business operations
- Communications plans to keep employees, stakeholders, customers, shareholders, and other key players informed and updated
Who Can Help WIth Business Continuity Planning?
Many companies turn to a third party for managed IT services related to business continuity. Your managed services provider can complete risk and threat assessments, assist in policy development, and manage data storage, backups, and recovery. Your managed services provider can recommend solutions for all aspects of your IT infrastructure, including:
- Managed IT, including hardware and software management, help-desk services and system monitoring
- Managed security services, including automatically updated anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-phishing tools
- System and network monitoring using advanced firewalls that identify suspicious activity, issue alerts, and quarantine threats
The Rea & Associates is a trusted managed services provider delivering business continuity, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, and managed IT solutions throughout northeast Ohio. To learn more, contact us today.
