The Essential Elements of a Business Continuity Plan
January 4th, 2022 by admin
Businesses today are at a higher risk of cyber attacks more than ever. Keeping your business vulnerable to a cyber attack can cripple a business or destroy its IT systems permanently. Moreover, hyper-convergence and digital transformation create an unintended gateway to vulnerabilities, failures, risks, and attacks. Therefore, it is vital to invest in business continuity services.
Why Should You Develop a Business Continuity Plan?
You need a business continuity plan to defend you against all these risks while protecting critical applications and data from breaches.
Furthermore, a business continuity plan can help identify as well as address resiliency synchronization between applications, business processes, and IT infrastructure. This is much needed to prevent a high cost of damage. Did you know that an infrastructure failure can cost nearly $100,000 an hour while a critical application can result in $500,000 to approximately $1 million per hour?
However, once you have a business continuity plan in place, you can easily minimize downtime while realizing sustainable improvements in:
- IT disaster recovery
- Business continuity
- Corporate crisis management capabilities
- Regulatory compliance
Now that you know the importance of a business continuity plan let us take a deeper dive to understand the essential components of the plan. Take a look:
Risk Assessment
As no two businesses are the same, they face different risks. Therefore, when creating a business continuity plan, it is crucial to assess the risk your business faces and the ones that pose the most significant potential harm. The idea behind this assessment is to effectively assess the risks your business is up against to prepare better to address those challenges.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
This will help you address and predict business disruption consequences, thereby collecting information to develop recovery strategies. Your business impact analysis should include:
- A solid understanding of the changes introduced if there is an unplanned disruption
- Regulatory and legal repercussions of unexpected disruption
- Post disruption dependencies
- Test plan validation
- Ranking of priorities and order of operations
Identification of Critical Functions
This will help reveal the processes critical to maintaining and running a business if there is an unplanned disruption. Here it is important to identify business-critical priorities while focusing recovery efforts. This may include priorities like:
- Revenue operations
- Physical security
- Payroll and time tracking
- Information security
- Core business functions
- Data protection after recovery
- Identity and access management
Communications
This element focuses on maintaining communication between your team, employees, customers, and key stakeholders much needed to share critical information when an unplanned disruption occurs. Here HR professionals can play a pivotal role in ensuring timely and consistent communication between the staff and organizational recovery efforts.
As for customers, social media can be your go-to tool for providing timely updates. Put simply; you have to work on your crisis communication strategy to keep people informed when a disaster strikes.
Data Protection
After a disaster, to ensure business continuity, you must have the right measures in place to keep your crucial data protected and ensure it is accessible to you from remote locations. Therefore, all data should be backed up in the cloud or data server to ensure business continuity.
You can also use providers like Google Drive and Dropbox for data protection and remote access. Nonetheless, you must create data backup starting from now so that you aren't caught flat-footed when an emergency strikes.
Create a Recovery Plan and Test
Your recovery plan should outline the essential steps to get your business up and running again. It should also include a time frame so that you are clear on how much time it will take for your business to recover and get back on track to minimize financial losses.
Nonetheless, once you have a plan in place, make sure to test and evaluate the reliability of your business continuity plan. This will help you identify gaps in your plan and anticipate any changes along the way.
If you need more information or assistance with business continuity services, contact us today. Allow our expert team to assist you.
Posted in: Solutions, Data Backup, Cybersecurity