Business continuity and disaster planning are maybe two of the least sexy, but most important activities you’ll undertake as a business owner. If you want to ensure your business has done all it can to minimize the impact of any disruption in the event of a disaster or emergency this blog is for you, so please read on.
I’ll be explaining the process of developing a risk recovery strategy to identify the key risks to your business, and what you need to do to address those risks, including back-up solutions or contingency arrangements and regular testing and reviewing to make sure they work.
What is Business continuity?
Business continuity is all about making sure that the business can continue to run in all sorts of circumstances, so one of the most important things to do is work out what would happen if your office premises were destroyed. This might be due to a flood, fire or other natural disaster or simply equipment failure. In order to maintain your business and ensure that staff can still get paid, it’s important you ask questions such as where will staff work from? And what data needs backing up?
You should also make sure you have plans for different kinds of crises which may affect your business. For example, if suppliers are not available; or customers are unable to buy from you. It’s a good idea to create a plan for each eventuality and discuss it with management and employees so everyone knows what they should be doing in a crisis situation.
Identifying the critical resources needed for continued business operation
You should identify the critical resources needed for continued business operations. Look at your building, data-center, network systems, and all of your employees to understand who and what would be necessary to keep your company running after a disaster. This may be obvious — like your power grid or server — but you might also need a particular employee or team of employees in order to make sure everything can get back up and running.
Also think about what equipment you’d need in order to provide products or services to your customers during a crisis.
Here are some key things to consider:
- Is there essential equipment that must remain operational? Could the operation move to another location? Could it continue with only certain parts of the operation available?
- Are there suppliers whose services are critical? What happens if they aren’t available — do you have substitutes that can perform those roles? Will it affect other areas of the business?
Identifying the potential threats and vulnerabilities in your business
Now that you have a business continuity plan (BCP) in place, it’s important to also create a disaster recovery plan (DRP), which will help you effectively deal with disasters as they occur. In order to come up with an effective DRP, you must start by identifying the types of disasters your business might face. To do this, determine what could cause the loss of data or damage to the company’s computer systems.
Here are some potential threats and vulnerabilities you can start with:
- Human error – because we are, obviously, only human.
- Natural disaster—fire, flood, earthquake, etc.
- Hardware failure—cracked hard drives, broken motherboards
- Software failure—malfunctioning programs or incompatible software
- Computer virus—malicious code that infects computers and other devices or makes them unusable; can also spread from one device to another through email attachments and downloaded files
- Computer hacking —a person uses their knowledge of computer programming and systems administration skills to try and access networks without authorization.
Disaster recovery strategies
Here are a few strategies that can be used in disaster recovery:
- Develop a data backup and recovery plan.
This can help businesses continue their operations and protect them from any damage caused by downtime, data loss or site loss.
2. Develop a business continuity plan for resuming operations after a disaster.
This will help ensure that critical business functions can resume quickly if they are disrupted due to an incident.
3. Develop a crisis communications plan
Do this so that information is available to the relevant parties as well as your consumers in case of an incident
4. Develop a business impact analysis (BIA)
This should analyse key business processes and helps you understand what resources and systems are needed to recover them following an incident.
It sounds dramatic, but be Prepared for the worst
Have a plan. This is probably the most important bit of advice. If you don’t have a DR plan, your data recovery will take longer and will be far more expensive. Create a set of SOPs around the plan so you can trust the right steps will be taken if something happens.
You should also make sure that your employees know their roles in the event of an emergency.
Practice the plan regularly so everyone knows what they’re doing if something does happen. This also lets you test out different parts of your DRP to see if there are any weak spots. If everything goes according to schedule, then great: You’ve learned something! If things don’t go as well as expected during testing, that’s okay too—you’ve still learned something valuable about how well your DRP will work in real-life situations and can fix those problems before anything bad happens for real.
Review the plan often and make adjustments when necessary. It’s not the nicest part of the job to think about bad things happening, but the world is an uncertain place – so you need to account for this in your disaster recovery planning. Make sure that there’s someone who’s responsible for keeping track of things (and doing it regularly), or you could end up with an out-of-date disaster recovery plan that won’t work when you actually need it to.
Have you ever had an emergency situation with your business and had to implement a disaster recovery plan? Will you be putting one in place if you haven’t already? Please share your experiences below, or get in contact today for a chat about how to get started. You can book your call with me here.
