Factors That Must Be Included In Your Business Continuity Plan

Disasters happen. If your organization fails to plan for the worst, then when something horrible does happen, you could be looking at catastrophe. However, if you have a comprehensive continuity plan in place, you have a fighting chance. Listed below are some of the elements you absolutely must address when creating your business’ continuity plan. 

There is always risk in business. The better your business can assess and plan for risk, the better it will respond to adversity. Here are a few factors that you should see in your business continuity plan:

• A Threat Matrix - Risk management beings with identifying possible risks. That means all legitimate threats, of which there are quite a few. Take a while contemplating all the relevant risks to your business and rank them from most likely to happen to least likely. 
  
  
• Critical Processes - Outline what makes your business run. Every business leans on critical processes that if interrupted could be devastating to achieving success. 
  
  
• Command Chain - Not everyone is a boss. Businesses have a chain of command that should be documented. Be sure to accurately represent how your business works and not just the titles of the people involved. 
  
  
• Employee Safety and Evacuation Plan - One part of risk management is to make sure no one gets hurt and that everyone is updated with all relevant information. The first part relies on you having a comprehensive safety and evacuation plan in place.
  
  
• Communication Plan and Contact Information - The other part is to have an idea about who will be the point of contact for each threat. If your marketing office springs a leak and six inches of water rushes in, does your accounting team on the next floor need to be notified immediately? Breaks in continuity mean all breaks and every department should have a point of contact registered in the continuity plan.
  
  
• Backup Processes - One of the bigger considerations when any threat comes to fruition is data. It is one of the most critical assets any business has. Ensuring that your backup and disaster recovery processes are regularly tested and maintaining redundancy is imperative to almost any problem. 
  
  
• IT Inventory and Infrastructure - Most businesses don’t have a whole other office ready to go when something fails. Ensuring you know what is in your inventory, how it is used, and how to restore those systems if something were to happen to your physical infrastructure is an imperative consideration. 
  
  
• End of Incident Criteria - When a breach in continuity happens, downtime is most certainly the enemy, but what would be worse is if you are fighting for your business’ life and the threat has passed without any notice.  Be sure that when a situation comes to light that you have the system in place to be able to review the problem and return to normalcy.
  
  

A business continuity plan can literally save your business from anything from a cyberattack to a flood. These line-items will help you create a solid continuity plan, but if you really want to hash your plan out, call the IT consultants at Macro Systems. We can help you build a continuity plan that will allow your business to respond to anything thrown its way. Contact us today at 703-359-9211.