Fires, floods, pandemics, periods of civil unrest – disasters come in multiple forms and can strike suddenly and without much warning. They’re not fun to think about, but if you want your business to be ready when one occurs, you have to plan and come up with smart business continuity planning. This guide explores how to make your plan.
What Is Business Continuity Planning?
It’s a plan designed to keep your business – or, at the very least, its more critical operations – going when disasters or crises strike. It outlines the necessary steps to follow, including the people to contact, ways to minimize costly downtime, and how to cope when difficult circumstances arise that could put your personnel, premises, or operations at risk.
The value of business continuity planning can hardly be understated, and it’s equally crucial for both small and big businesses. Disasters can interrupt so many core business processes – like knocking out your IT system and thereby blocking your supply chain – and make your office or other workspaces temporarily unavailable. But, with business continuity planning, your firm can push on through the tough times.
Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery
At a glance, business continuity may seem equivalent to disaster recovery. Yet, while the two terms are related, each represents its own distinct concept.
Disaster recovery, for example, is mostly concerned with getting tech solutions and IT services back up and running after a disaster strikes. Business continuity plans are bigger and broader than that. They take every element of the business into account, from its team members to the supply chain, not just its tech and core infrastructure.
How to Organize Business Continuity Planning
Over 95% of businesses experience disruption at least once every two years, and more than 75% of the time that disruption leads to medium or high levels of impact on business operations. Thus, conducting business continuity planning is imperative if you wish to help your brand survive hard times with minimal disruption and impact.
But preparing a plan like this is a process. It’s not the sort of thing you can just put together overnight. It’ll take time, planning, and involvement from multiple key people throughout your business structure. The first step, then, is to assemble a planning time and team, ideally made up of people with management experience, strong organization, and a good eye for detail.
With the team in place, here are some next steps to follow:
Assess Possible Threats
Before you think about how certain disasters or threats might impact your business, and how to mitigate that impact, you have to first identify the threats in question. There are a lot of them – from natural disasters like fires and storms to man-made threats like ransomware attacks, criminal activities, or hardware failures. Draw up a list of the many possible dangers to your business before you proceed.
Carry Out Impact Assessments
Next, with the threats identified, it’s time to look at the impact each one could have on your company. For this, you need to carry out a business impact analysis, which basically involves a detailed, data-driven assessment of each threat. This involves determining which processes it would impact, the possible duration of its effects, losses to productivity and resources, impact on customer or stakeholder confidence, etc.
In short, these assessments need to be very detailed. There are a lot of questions to pose and to answer. It’s wise to work closely with various team heads and department leaders to fully understand the possible scope of damage that might be done to each department and in each scenario. The more information you get about potential risks and emergencies, the more you’ll have to work with when it comes to finding ways to cope with them.
Identify Critical Functions and Processes
Ultimately, the main aim of business continuity planning is just what it says – establishing continuity. It’s about keeping the business going, and to do that, you have to focus on your most crucial, fundamental functions. Again, for this, it helps to work closely with department heads and other internal experts at various levels throughout the business to understand which systems are the most critical to focus on saving.
List Contacts, Resources, and Actions to Maintain and/or Restore Those Functions
Once you’ve identified the systems and processes to prioritize in your plan, you must next work on strategies to maintain those systems during moments of crisis or restore them, should they become disrupted in some way. This is the crux of business continuity planning – it’s the part that essentially tells you and the various teams throughout your business what to do when disasters strike.
You should focus on both proactive strategies that help to prevent crises from having too big of an impact, as well as reactive strategies that guide workers and management on how to respond when a crisis occurs. Make sure your plan includes lists of key people to contact, resources to draw from, and steps to take, from the initial rapid response to the more gradual, long-term recovery efforts.
Review and Test Your Plan
Lastly, but still very importantly, business continuity planning requires regular reviews and improvements over time, because businesses don’t just sit still and stay the same. They change, evolve, and grow, and as that happens, their needs and processes also change which impacts their recovery and continuity plans.
So, make sure you schedule time to test your plan semi-regularly, to spot gaps or oversights that need addressing. Also bring in key stakeholders to review your plan as your business grows, so you can identify any key changes needed.
Prepare Your Business for the Worst
It’s much better to prepare for disasters ahead of time. That way, you’ll be ready if and when one occurs. There’ll be far less panic and despair, as you’ll have clear instructions and procedures to follow to get things back on track and minimize the harm done.
Metro Sales can help with that. We offer a range of managed IT and disaster recovery services to form part of business continuity planning, serving firms across Burnsville, Twin Cities, Fargo, Duluth, and St. Cloud. Contact our team today to find out more.