Business continuity is the ability of a business to return to normal (or near-normal) levels of service following an unexpected event.
If employees cannot work your business can not function and you are at risk of losing customers, potential business and suffering financial and reputation damage.? This is why it is important to have a plan to recover quickly should something unexpected happen.
Being able to refer to a well thought out plan with rational pre-made decisions is crucial.
It is not just natural disasters you to need to consider when preparing for business continuity, below are just some of the scenarios that may impact your business:
- Traditional disasters: Natural disasters, fires, floods.
- Power or Internet outages: these could be as a result of other disasters or could be individual outages outside of the businesses control
- IT Outages and Cyberattacks: Such as Ransomware: attacks or outages that leave key services unusable
- Pandemics: Both the implications of increased sick leave and restrictions put in place to stop the spread of disease
- Loss of premises or restricted access: Maybe your landlord goes bust and you are locked out of your building or a mandatory evacuation due to threatened natural disaster
- Loss of key personnel: Perhaps your CEO is hit by a bus or the IT manager unexpectedly finds new employment
- Theft or vandalism: Criminal acts that impact your ability to do business
How do you prepare? There is no one-size fits all plan - here are some key points to consider:
- Identify Critical Systems, Locations, and Personnel: Determine the most crucial elements of your business operations and find ways to create redundancies or alternatives for them. This may include cross-training employees, finding alternative work locations, or ensuring IT systems have backups.
- Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis: A business impact analysis (BIA) helps determine which business activities are most critical and what resources are required to maintain operations during and after a disruption. Identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities allows you to create plans to mitigate their impact.
- Response and Recovery Plans: Document a response plan with short-term actions to take during a disaster to limit the damage. Additionally, create a recovery plan that outlines medium-term strategies to restore normal business operations.??
- Playbooks for common events:? If a particular type of event is likely to occur, (perhaps you live in a hurricane zone and evacuations are common) consider creating a playbook that can be referred to and enacted when it occurs.
- Communication: Your plan should include a way to communicate quickly and effectively with staff, key stakeholders. Also include the location of contact lists for key personnel and outside services
The business continuity plan should be tested regularly to identify weaknesses and ensure that all employees know their responsibilities.?
Examples of testing could include:
- Ensuring cross-trained staff can perform their tasks.
- Having test days where staff work from alternate locations
- Conduct failover, redundancy and disaster recovery tests of IT systems
Feed the results of these tests (as well as results from incidents) back into the plan to improve and refine it
