What Is Business Continuity?
Business continuity is the capability of an organization to continue the delivery of products or services at pre-defined acceptable levels following a disruptive incident.
Our hope for you is that you never experience the panic and uncertainty of a cyber attack. It’s a horrible experience that leaves you feeling exposed, vulnerable, and even embarrassed. In many cases its’ necessary to alert your customers to what has happened – and that they’re data may have been exposed.
It’s not a good feeling. You lose the confidence of your customers, your partners, and your employees – but most damaging, you often lose confidence in yourself.
That’s why – in addition to strict and diligent cyber security measures – we also strongly encourage you to have a business continuity plan in place.
Because if you don’t prepare for the worst, it will be all the more damaging to your business in the event that something bad occurs.
And “something bad” doesn’t just refer to hackers and cyber crime. It’s anything that severely interrupts business as usual. A disruptive event can be:
- Unexpected hardware issues
- Natural disasters
- Cyber attacks
- Issues with your internet service provider
- Prolonged power outages
- Etc.
Preparing to deal with these disruptive events is all about finding ways to preserve business continuity. And without a plan, business continuity can quickly fall apart after your business gets hit with a disruptive event.
That’s why it’s so important to have a business continuity plan in place.
Business Continuity Planning in 5 Steps
The cycle of business continuity planning involves 5 steps:
- Analyzing the risks, threats, vulnerabilities, critical systems, etc. that you already face.
- Deciding on (or designing) a solution that will help you mitigate those threats and recover.
- Implementing that solution.
- Testing the solution (for example, testing backup systems to ensure critical files can be recovered within an acceptable time frame).
- Maintaining and updating the solutions as the business and environment changes.
As you perform step 5, you may discover that the situation has changed from when you performed your first analysis (usually a year or more previously). When that happens, you begin again at step one.
By doing this, you ensure that your plan is always up-to-date, and relevant.
Why Having a Plan Matters
Depending on the size of your business, you may find that it is impossible or impractical to keep all functions up and running after a disaster. Part of the process of planning for business continuity is deciding what functions are absolutely essential and budgeting with that in mind.
Just going through the process of creating your business continuity plan can improve your own and your employees’ understanding of your business. Once a plan is in place, everyone in the organization, from management to your entry-level employees, should have clear guidelines on what they should do in the event of a disruptive event.
Uncertainty in the face of disaster, while understandable, will cost your business valuable time and money.
Developing a strong business continuity plan and communicating it to all the members of your organization could be the difference between crumbling, and seamlessly dealing with unpredictable events.
You don’t have to do your business continuity planning alone. At 911 PC Help, we are here to help you!
Just give us a call 415-800-1130, or click here, to schedule a free consultation. We can walk you through the ins-and-outs of disaster recovery planning so you can rest easy knowing that even in the worst-case scenario, you’re still protected.