As the last year has shown us, we don’t know exactly what the future holds. However, with manmade and natural disasters like cyber attacks and power failures from storms, it’s a matter of when, not if, your company is faced with a situation that could threaten its operations. Read on to learn more about protecting your business with a business continuity plan.
Building a Comprehensive Business Continuity Plan
In its broadest sense, a business continuity plan is a proactive strategy to keep your business up and running during and after a disaster. That disaster could be a storm causing a power outage, or a ransomware attack like the ones affecting major companies in recent years. These can cause costly downtime that can hurt your company’s revenue and reputation. While data protection is part of the business continuity framework, business continuity plans go beyond to consider the relationships between people, processes and technology. A solid plan will take into consideration individual departments and their operations as well as how these departments work with the others. Risk management means evaluating likely threats, and the impact they’ll have on your business.
Important Questions to Ask Your Technology Advisor
Developing a business continuity plan starts with asking questions about each department. What are their functions, and who carries out which functions? What processes do they use to carry out these functions, and what data and applications do they use in these processes? What are the mission-critical functions, and what infrastructure is needed? Then, consider how the departments work together, including the IT and security teams. Consider looking at your plan through the lens of resiliency, recovery, and contingency. Will your company be nimble enough to handle different threats? What are objectives for recovery, and what are your contingency plans for unexpected situations? The more specific your company can be in planning, the better. Appropriate testing, with evaluation of results and refining your plan, is also critical.
More than ever, your business needs to be nimble in their response to any disaster. For help in developing a comprehensive plan for your company’s response, contact us today.