25 November 2019

It’s time to expect the unexpected with business continuity

It’s time to expect the unexpected! Do you have a business continuity plan or manage business continuity? If not, why not. Integrating a business continuity plan within your business is key to prepare and requirement is to keep essential functions up and running during a disaster and to recover with as little downtime as possible.

Business continuity is important for organisations of any size. The first step in business continuity planning is deciding which of an organisation's functions are essential and allocating the available budget accordingly.

A business continuity plan has three key elements: Resilience, recovery and contingency.

A company can increase resilience by designing critical functions and infrastructures with various disaster possibilities in mind; this can include staffing rotations, data redundancy and maintaining a surplus of capacity. Ensuring resiliency against different scenarios can also help businesses maintain essential services on location and off-site without interruption.

Rapid recovery to restore business functions after a disaster is crucial. Setting recovery time objectives for different systems, networks or applications can help prioritise which elements need to be recovered first. Other recovery strategies include resource inventories, agreements with third parties to take on company activity and using converted spaces for mission-critical functions.

A contingency plan has procedures in place for a variety of external scenarios and can include a chain of command that distributes responsibilities within the organisation. These responsibilities can include hardware replacement, leasing emergency office spaces, damage assessment and contracting third-party vendors for assistance.

If your organisation doesn't have a business continuity plan in place, start by assessing your business processes, determining which areas are vulnerable, and the potential losses if those processes go down for a day, a few days or a week.

Next, develop a plan. This involves six general steps:

-       Identify the scope of the plan.

-       Identify key business areas.

-       Identify critical functions.

-       Identify dependencies between various business areas and functions.

-       Determine acceptable downtime for each critical function.

-       Create a plan to maintain operations.

One common business continuity planning tool is a checklist that includes supplies and equipment, the location of data backups and backup sites, where the plan is available and who should have it, and contact information for emergency responders, key personnel and providers. Remember that the disaster recovery plan is part of the business continuity plan, so developing a disaster recovery plan if you don't already have one should be part of your process. As you create your plan, consider interviewing key personnel in organisations who have gone through a disaster successfully. Their insights could prove incredibly valuable in helping you to craft a solid plan.

Looking for some advice and support with your business continuity plan? Get in touch by emailing [email protected] or call 01924 203335.