Nothing throws the need for business continuity into sharp relief like a disaster.
Last year’s COVID-19 pandemic did just that — and is continuing to motivate businesses to create effective business continuity plans as we move into the second year of dealing with the virus.
Typically, businesses don’t receive warning of a disaster about to strike.
Whether you are dealing with natural disasters such as fire, flood, or a virus, or a man-made issue such as power outage, cyberattack, or technology malfunction, crises have the power to cripple the business that is not prepared, sometimes forcing them to shut their doors for good.
Your organization needs to have an up-to-date, tried-and-true business continuity plan in place. You also have to have a reliable team responsible for ensuring all parts of the plan are carried out according to instructions.
Techniques for Achieving Business Continuity in a Crisis
Business continuity refers to the act of continuing business functions or restoring them quickly in the face of significant disruption. Achieving business continuity in a crisis hinges on having a clear plan of action and successfully carrying it out.
While this may sound simple, there is a lot of planning that goes into responding efficiently during an active crisis.
Distilled to its essence, the creation of an effective business continuity plan has several stages:
- Have a Long-Term Plan
Long term continuity plans hinge upon identifying the following elements:
- The plan’s scope
- Key business areas
- Critical functions
- Dependencies among business areas
- Acceptable downtimes for each critical function
- A plan that will help maintain operations
Other factors include checklists, location of data backups, contact information, key personnel, and denote the plan’s action team members plus their assigned tasks.
- Practice, Practice, Practice
Knowing if your plan will work requires controlled testing to identify issues in advance of a crisis and work to eliminate them.
While leadership will come from headquarters, you should create both global and local response teams to handle issues at all levels.
Low impact events can be managed on a local level, while more severe events might involve team members from all departments or locations.
Be sure to practice implementing your plan on a routine basis to ensure it is fresh in everyone’s mind and consider changes in position or employment that might have occurred since the last practice date.
- Understand the Difference Between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
While your business continuity plan should address communications, workforce response, and IT infrastructure recovery, it is not the same as a disaster recovery plan.
Disaster recovery plans specifically address your IT infrastructure recovery, so they are effectively a subset of your continuity plan. Their objective is to reduce downtime and provide access to critical IT operations and infrastructure to keep your business running.
It is important to note that a disaster recovery plan can be activated even when your continuity plan is not, for example, in the event of a power outage. You can quickly transfer your operations to a backup site without further disruption to your business.
- Get Expert Help Where Needed
Relying on a technology consulting firm’s expertise with in-depth experience with business continuity, cybersecurity, IT management, and current technologies can be a critical asset to a workable continuity plan.
Third-party experts are experienced in preventing IT downtime and can help you assess, design, deploy and maintain the infrastructure you need to keep your business protected.
Let Blue Technologies Help Protect Your Business in a Crisis — or Any Time
Our team of IT experts has the industry-leading knowledge you can rely upon to help you create — and deploy — a disaster recovery plan that will help you maintain business continuity in the event of a crisis.
We provide expert assessment of your current infrastructure to sort out and minimize vulnerabilities, provide redundancies, and reduce your risk of data theft and loss.
Once we understand your starting point, we can build a strong, actionable IT plan that will dovetail perfectly with your current business continuity procedures to ensure your data is protected — and available — in the event of a crisis.
Keep your company running smoothly in the event of a disaster. Contact a Blue Technologies consultant today and let our team of IT experts prepare the perfect disaster recovery plan for your business.
