IT Consulting
IT Consulting Experts Share the Must Have Business Continuity Plan Checklist
The frequency of man-made and
natural disasters has increased in the past few decades. Crises typically arise
without warning. Organizations also face a serious impact of these disasters.
While you shouldn't start every day expecting the worst but you should be
relatively prepared for anything to happen. A business crisis can cost your
company a lot of money and ruin your reputation if you aren't proactively
prepared to handle one. To withstand and thrive during these many threats,
businesses understand that they need to do more than just creating a reliable
infrastructure that supports growth and protects data. With the growth of
cyberattacks, companies are moving from a traditional recovery approach to an
automated and software-defined resiliency approach.
According to IDC, on average, an
infrastructure failure can cost USD $100,000 an hour and a critical application
failure can cost USD $500,000 to USD $1 million per hour. Whether you operate a
small business or a large corporation, it's vital to retain current customers
while increasing your customer base to remain competitive. The best test of
your capability is when you do right even in an adverse event.
This is where business continuity
and disaster recovery planning comes as the last resort to protect your
business. DRP and BCP are the last corrective control of an organization when
all other controls have failed. Though both work differently, BCP ensures to
restore all functions of your organization and works as the best shot at
success during a disaster. On the other hand, DRP is a short-term plan for
dealing with specific IT-oriented outages. In situations like this an IT consulting company can really help you in creating a plan.
Let us discuss in detail about
how having a business continuity plan prepares your organization to jump into
action when disaster strikes.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
As the word sounds, it refers to
maintaining business functions or quickly resuming them in the event of a major
disruption. BCP is a document that outlines an actionable plan that is used to
handle both minor disruptions and full-blown threats. BCP is the creation and
validation of a practical logistical plan for an enterprise to recover and
restore critical function within a predetermined time after the disaster. It is
to be performed before a disaster occurs otherwise it would be too late to plan
effective response. A business continuity plan is a guiding document which
layout steps to be initiated by management to run the business under stressful
conditions on the occurrence of the disaster.
The COVID-19 outbreak is the
recent example that has already caused health, safety, and economic damage that
is still in play across the globe with the United States leading in the number
of positive cases and deaths. In this situation for the companies that haven’t
managed remote employees in any great number, the transition to this new
working style could prove to be complex. A lack of a business continuity plan
in such a situation may let you go out of business for good. You can
either create such a plan by yourself or can hire experts from a company that
offers complete product
engineering services.
The Complete Business Continuity Checklist
A successful business continuity plan depends on each organization’s specific structure, systems, and environments, geographical location, as well as the severity and nature of the disaster situation. Below is the checklist summed up based upon these points which will help in streamlining your efforts and will help you in creating a successful business continuity plan.
Assemble the team
Each member of the team should
know their roles respectively so that they will be accountable to the assigned
task in the future at any such miserable situation.
Draw up the plan
This is the key process as you
need to map out the strategy at this point. Make a list of all the disruptions
that could potentially hinder your operations along with formulating practical
recovery strategies for these scenarios.
Conduct business impact analysis
It is important to analyze the
impact of all the potential threats to your daily operations. Your business
continuity team and management personnel should understand all the problematic
scenarios that may accompany a disaster whether they are natural like floods,
volcano, pandemic, or downtime due to power outage, hardware, or system
failure.
Educate and train
Develop a comprehensive training
program to help the team develop the required skills. The team should be
trained on the objectives, requirements, and key components of your BC plan.
Also Read: 5
Practical Applications of AR/VR in Employee Training & Education
Isolate sensitive info
Every company should prioritize
the data and keep financial records, login credentials, and other
mission-critical information somewhere that allows for quick and convenient
access during recovery.
Backup important data
A backup plan means one should always keep copies of the irreplaceable and critical data. This may include document files, employee and customer records, business emails, and even select data stored on mobile devices. If a disaster happens today, an effective backup strategy can make sure that your business can recover tomorrow from any disaster. You can use various cloud computing solutions to store your data safely.