Business Continuity Planning - Also Aptly Called Disaster Recovery Planning- What would you do if you lost power for several hours at work?
- What would you do if burst water flooded your businesses server room?
- What would you do if your telephony lines went down for more than a few hours?
- Could your business survive such an unplanned interruption?
Business continuity planning is absolutely vital to business success. In today's world of interconnectivity, almost every aspect of a company's operation is vulnerable to disruptions of one kind or another. Unforeseen crises can disrupt or destroy a business. Here we take a look at Enterprise level continuity planning. It always helps to have a big picture when your planning to do a similar thing for Small and Medium Businesses. Work to your scale of needs, not every business needs to go to the extreme, best practices should be used to dictate your approach. In recent years, the reliance on information technology and the safety of business critical information has increased many times. A recent survey showed 43% of all businesses that have a major loss of data never reopen. Another incredible 51% of all businesses close within two years which leaves only 6% who will survive long-term. Not very good numbers are they? The reason the survival rate is so low is because everyone is interested in either making a profit for stakeholders or channelling their profit into new projects that they miss the importance of spending some time and money on building a strong business continuity plan. Larger businesses spend huge budgets on their computer systems as they build them into their business-critical infrastructure but do not have a documented and tested action plan when disaster strikes. WHAT CONSTITUTES A DISASTER?
In the business world, whether it is a large corporation or self employed artisan, a disaster is something that is dramatically going to affect the ability to function normally, and that usually means something that will affect the bottom line. The types of disasters that could affect your business range from power failures to computer system crashes and from natural disasters to supply chain problems. Natural disasters:
• Earthquakes,
• hurricanes,
• tornadoes,
• floods,
• fire, Manmade disasters:
• Human error,
• employee theft or fraud,
• sabotage,
• computer hacking,
• viruses,
• burglary or robbery,
• illness, Technical:
• Power outages,
• communication blackouts,
• equipment failure,
• software failure, Planning for business continuity is a comprehensive process that includes disaster recovery, business recovery, business resumption, and contingency planning. THE BENEFITS OF BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING
The benefits of having a good business continuity plan are:
• Your business will stay in operation during and after a disaster
• You should expect to be able to continue a controlled work flow during a crisis.
• Your income will remain relatively stable
• You can be relied on when your competitors are floundering
• You can even grow through a disaster
• Your shareholders have confidence in your business, knowing that you have a plan
• You gain respect from customers and suppliers HOW DOES A BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN WORK?
The first and most vital step is to create a business impact analysis (BIA)
An impact can be categorized in one of two ways. It is either quantitative or it is qualitative.
Quantitative impacts can result in tangible loss. Anything that can be described in quantity, percentages or monetary value is quantitative. For instance, losing 50% of your inventory or an increase in operating costs due to overtime work to recover systems will have a quantitative impact.
A qualitative impact is intangible and results in a loss of quality. These cannot easily be quantified in monetary terms. For instance, reputation and client satisfaction or even staff morale could have an impact on the quality of service.
Either impact could send your business plummeting if you do not have a business continuity plan in place. WHAT CAN I DO?
It is important to manage the risk to your business to an acceptable level. This is done by developing and implementing a Business Continuity Plan (BCP). The BCP is the foundation on which the survival of your business stands. Do you have a small startup business? There are some simple procedures to get you started. See our Small Business Backup and Disaster Recovery Articles
Business continuity planning is complex and it is vital to get it right for the survival of your business. Outsourcing the task to qualified business continuity planners is the correct step to take to avoid mistakes.
Business continuity planners will identify and analyze your business to establish critical systems, applications and vital documents are needed by the business and business functions for operational activities to be continued after a disaster.
Analyzing the processes correctly will help to understand which are the critical processes to be recovered, the maximum affordable downtime, the vital data and recovery point objectives (RPO) for the data.
A poorly performed analysis will lead to misjudgement when creating recovery point objectives (RPO) leading to lost data, perhaps several days worth.
By not conducting a correct BIA, including a workflow analysis, a critical system could be missed. Although it may be recovered later, it may not meet the recovery time objective (RTO). Depending on the nature of the business, there could be harsh repercussions. Outsource this very vital task to business continuity planners who understand the pitfalls and know how to avoid them. Take the first step and call us now on 020 8643 6644 to find out how we can help you.
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