It should come as no surprise that the practice of business continuity planning is one that every business needs to undergo. This planning serves as essentially your only insurance against some form of data disaster or another. Consider your own business for a moment--could it survive a fire, a critical failure in part of your infrastructure, or theft? With a business continuity plan, there’s a chance it just might.
First Things First:
In order to create a business continuity plan, you need to first have prepared a compiled list of the impact each department will feel in a worst-case scenario. What would you do if you lost access to your key vendors, your critical IT, your location, or your personnel and staff resources? How long would you take to recover if you lost each of these resources?
Once you have established these variables within a reasonable range of success, it is time to develop a thorough business continuity plan. This plan needs to cover four considerations: employee safety, essential business functions, company assets, and communication throughout the event. This will help to ensure that every crucial part of your business is accessible in case of a disaster of some sort.
The Four Considerations
Stress Testing
Once your plan is put together, test it out for effectiveness among your team. After all, a business continuity strategy that fails to enable the business to continue isn’t a strategy worth having. If some part doesn’t serve the way it needs to, go back to the drawing board and revise it until it does. This will require repeated tests, so make sure that you’re ready for the long haul.
Businesses can be fragile things, so it never hurts to prepare for the worst. For help in making these preparations, reach out to the experts at Managed IT Force.
About the author
Dan has 25 years of progressive experience in the IT industry. He has led three successful companies focused on small and medium business IT solutions since 1997.
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