Studies have found that four-fifths of all businesses that experience a severe catastrophe fail within a year and a half. Your entire business may be safe if you plan to handle such events. Furthermore, as we can see from current events, significant crises don’t just include property damage to commercial buildings. But they all suffered due to a lack of business continuity plan posed by the pandemic’s limits and problems.
Business continuity and disaster recovery are essential components of any recovery plan. This article will examine their differences and detail the best ways to incorporate both into your company.
What is Business Continuity?
Business continuity is the organization’s capacity to provide goods or services at predetermined, acceptable levels after a disruptive incident. In practice, this risk management strategy means you are creating a system to ensure that your company can continue to provide the same quality of service as before the plan had to be used or as close to it as reasonably practicable.
Disaster recovery: How does it impact business continuity?
Disaster Recovery is when a company gets access to vital data and services following an unplanned catastrophe. Any disaster recovery plan should include a set of guidelines and instructions for resuming operations following a severe disruptive event in the affected areas of the company.
Disaster recovery belongs to business continuity. For instance, you could need access to a crucial database to provide business continuity. Your BC plan will convey how your organization will continue to run in the case of a failure or disaster. The DR plan will specify how many copies of the database are taken and where they are stored. They also learn to restore this data in the case of a catastrophe.
Creating a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan: 6 practical pointers
The straightforward six-point checklist that follows should help you get started on creating your plan. However, consider that risks can change over time, so to derive maximum benefit, repeat this exercise frequently.
- Analyze your company
Have a thorough knowledge of your company. What goods and services does your company provide? Find out what timelines or contracts clients might expect. Keep track of what equipment, software, or tools are present that are site-specific. Finally, try to comprehend what will happen if this website needs to be shut down for a brief or extended time. This will give you extensive knowledge about what to do in times of crisis.
- Analyze the risks that can have an impact on your company.
These include disasters like floods or fire and artificial catastrophes like thefts or break-ins. Problems might arise due to trouble entering the company building. The reasons might include illness, particularly the flu and other infectious diseases.
- Create your plan of action.
Next, construct your plan of action. What steps are necessary to prepare for or react to the abovementioned events? Make a list of what can be done in these situations. Also, figure out who is required to carry out these tasks and where and how these operations should occur. You need to understand the dire conditions that you will have to encounter. Additionally, plan out ways how you will evaluate whether this tactic is successful or not.
- Create your strategy.
Ensure the strategy is prepared correctly and given to any staff members involved in implementing it. Ensure that the department heads understand their duties.
Prepare and maintain the systems that enable communication with your staff.
- Test your strategy.
A plan is meaningless if it is never tested; therefore, make sure to do this frequently, especially whenever a key employee leaves the company.
Verify that your significant providers can function in the conditions above if your plan depends on them. Additionally, you should request a copy of their disaster recovery strategy from them.
- Update your strategy if anything changes.
Remember to update the plans whenever you test something, or something you’ve already described has undergone a significant update. This may be especially important if you’ve updated existing business procedures or integrated new technologies into your setup.
Conclusion
Efficient business continuity and disaster recovery strategy can be simple and inexpensive. Still, you typically only hear about these IT-related topics when there needs to be more planning and tragic results. It could be as easy as providing contact information for the workers or requesting that they take their laptops home each night.
Last but not least, keep in mind that business continuity and disaster recovery are not only the IT team or department domain. Everyone has a part to play in ensuring the company can withstand any tragedy, from a human error to a natural disaster.
