Your Organization Should Have a Business Continuity Plan

Business continuity is one topic that not a lot of people know a lot about; there isn’t a curriculum that presents a comprehensive outline on how to deal with disaster. Listed below are some continuity strategies that work, regardless of the situation, to get your organization coordinated and back up and running fast following a disaster scenario.

Why Do You Need a Business Continuity Plan?

You need a business continuity plan so that when some awful event happens, all the people that depend on your organization aren’t victims of your lack of preparedness. Having to shutter your business is never a good time, so if something were to happen that puts that option squarely on the table, having a plan in place that will permit your business regain solid footing is only reasonable.

What Exactly is a Business Continuity Plan?

It’s easy to talk about the things that you need to do to keep your business secure, but no matter how big your company is on the surface, once you realize how many people it affects, how many people have come to depend on it, and how many considerations are needed to keep everything in order in the face of an operational interruption, you realize you need a plan.

The business continuity plan is exactly that. It is a strategy that takes into account all the parts of a business, and makes contingencies for them all. Successful businesses manage risks better than less successful businesses, and a business continuity plan is put in place to manage all the potential risks that could jeopardize your business’ sustainability.

The Strategy Behind Business Continuity

In order to properly strategize a continuity plan, you’ll first have to determine what scenarios you would need one for. Naturally there are the ones you first consider: Disaster. When people think of disaster they usually think of fire, flood, tornado, etc. However, what needs to be comprehended is that any situation that could cause an interruption to regular operations needs to have a continuity strategy.

That’s not to say that a little Internet downtime that you’ll inevitably receive from your ISP needs to have a BC strategy tied to it, but any meaningful operational downtime could be quite costly. Thus, having a plan to proactively avoid risky problems puts your organization in a position to circumvent those events.

Some Business Continuity Tips for the Business New to Business Continuity

The first thing you have to identify are the risks you have. Risk is the number one variable you need to know to establish a successful business continuity strategy. Establishing what your organization's most prominent risks are, and what effect they will have on your business can lead you to understanding where to start.

For example: if your business is in a flood zone, you can be fairly sure that one of the biggest risks to your sustained operational effectiveness will be a flood. Since you know that flood is something you have to ward against, your business continuity strategy will be to set your business up to be able to sustain itself even if you are inundated with flood waters.

Some risks you are come across are inherent in the course of doing business, while some risks, including some of the worst ones, are specific to the situations your business will get into. This leads us to our second tip. We suggest that you give some thought to how to most effectively, and affordably, address the risks you’ve identified.

Oftentimes the answers are common sense, but sometimes resolutions can be hard to come across unless you play the scenario out. Let’s use the flood in a flood-zone example again. If you know you may run the risk of a flood inundating your place of business, you will want to run through scenarios to determine which strategy would be the most effective against a flood.

Once you’ve role played the entire situation, you should be familiar with some of the steps you will have to take if that particular risk were to become a problem. Something as simple as not having a good idea of your organization’s power needs could make periods of downtime into significant revenue-losing situations. Communication will speed things along, but only if they are effective.

That brings us to our third tip: contacts and communications. When creating an effective business continuity plan, you need to make sure that people understand their responsibilities in a disaster, and that the people that are in charge of this portion of the business continuity plan, have the resources they need in order to complete those responsibilities.

For example: if you are dealing with a potential flood, you will need to make determinations proactively. You will need the contact information of your disaster recovery officers, your vendors, or anyone else on your supply chain that will be affected by a flood that hinders your business’ ability to operate normally.

The last tip is to outline a minimum acceptable downtime for each vital function of your business. Chances are if you’re going so far as to develop a comprehensive business continuity strategy, you have already established that data is a large part of your sustained success and have developed a disaster recovery strategy. A DR strategy will surely identify how to keep the systems critical to your business’ operations safe; and, hopefully, if it’s done right, up and running properly.

Business continuity planning is all about staying proactive to ensure that your business can get through anything. If you would like some help with any of the four tips we shared, or any other part of a general business continuity plan, reach out to the business IT experts at Macro Systems today at 703-359-9211.