When the next emergency event strikes, how will you ensure that your organization continues to operate safely and generate revenue? Whether caused by a natural disaster, global pandemic, or a cyberattack, sudden disturbances are unpredictable and can unfold in many unexpected ways. Your leadership team is unlikely to get advanced notice about tomorrow’s upcoming disaster. That’s why it is so important to have a proven business continuity strategy today.
Simply explained, business continuity planning (BCP) is the process of preparing to maintain ongoing business functions or resuming them quickly in the event of a disaster. While certain industries have strict oversight on how they design and implement their plan, like banks and credit unions, many businesses don’t have the luxury of a government examiner to guide them down a specific path. For the rest of us, the following strategy outlines organizational instructions and procedures for dealing with potential threats. It also details emergency management procedures and determines what associates can do to ensure continuous business operation.
Did You Know?
According to the Bureau of Labor, 20% of businesses experience a failure due to fire, flood, power outage, or natural disaster. 60% of companies that experience data loss will shut down within six months, and only 35% of SMBs have a business continuity plan. In addition, the average cost of downtime can be up to $5600 per minute in mid-sized businesses and up to $11,000 per minute in enterprises. These statistics indicate that not having a business continuity plan in place can cost your company money and even result in a shutdown.
Business continuity planning can prepare your infrastructure to withstand disturbances and stay operational amidst any disaster. Besides general preparation, a successful BCP must include readiness procedures and instructions on who in your organization should be carrying out each step. Here is an example of a business continuity plan checklist to help you get started.
Business Continuity Checklist – Questions to Ask!
- Customer communication: what do we say to the customers, vendors and third-party providers to ensure support and transparency?
- Supply chain: how do we plan for continuous service or product delivery?
- Timing: how long will it take us to restore business processes and in what order?
- Employee support: how do we support our employees in the event of a disaster?
- Infrastructure management: how much of your organization’s IT operations are in the hands of one person? Do you have a plan B?
- Technology: what recovery solutions should be implemented to ensure critical technologies remain operable?
- Business allies: are managed IT services included in business continuity planning?
- Process management: what critical processes should we activate if technology fails?
- Relocation: in the event of a physical disaster, where do we relocate human resources and hardware?
- Event management: which teams will be managing emergency events and how?
- Staffing: do we have enough hands to carry out our business continuity plan?
- Dependencies: what factors are business processes dependent on to operate successfully?
- Drills: are we performing regular plan validation exercises to ensure our business continuity plan will function successfully?
- Documentation: have we properly documented all steps and actions to ensure complete preparedness?
These questions and more are on the minds of business executives, especially in today’s unpredictable global economy. No matter your industry, Atris can help you proactively prepare for any crisis, so your organization can come out of any difficult situation even better and stronger than before. We offer services that help protect your business from threats across multiple network devices and applications. Our team can proactively monitor and support your entire infrastructure and protect it from vulnerabilities and threats.
Contact us today to find out how you can safely prepare to face unforeseen events with confidence.