Since the 1970s, businesses have been planning for continuity in a sea of uncertainty brought on by growing cyber threats, fires, floods, and the geopolitically unstable environment we live in.
What started out as a primitive heat management solution for data center computers has now evolved into a much more detailed process entailing the detection, response, and quick recovery from disruptive events.
Today,business continuity planning is a core part of your broader risk management strategy enabling prompt recovery from attacks and equivalent issues threatening to disrupt operations.
Key Takeaways
- Despite the numerous measures put in place by IT professionals to prevent disasters, some disasters are far out of their reach.
- Business Continuity Planning (BCP), is a strategic approach that facilitates the prevention and quick recovery from potential threats thereby offering organizational resilience for the foreseeable future.
- A well-crafted Business Continuity plan provides protection to both the business and its customers by ensuring crucial service delivery in the face of a crisis.
- Business continuity plans should be regularly tested, reviewed, and updated to accommodate the evolving business risks.
What is Business Continuity Planning
Business continuity planning involves the identification and mitigation of all potential risks facing your organization’s operations. For instance, any business intending to maintain the loyalty of its customers long-term must prioritize its data integrity and security, and ensure frictionless accessibility of crucial services at all times.
When threatened with cybersecurity attacks, natural disasters, and power outages, businesses must have a business continuity plan that – at minimum – sees the restoration of mission-critical operations quickly and efficiently.
As the name suggests, business continuity planning is about the prevention and recovery from potential threats to ensure critical products and services are continually delivered to the business’s customers. This strategic business approach identifies any potential threats facing the organization and analyzes their possible impacts on business operations.
Business continuity planning aims to protect both the organization’s staff and its IT assets and ensures a quick bounce back to a previous operational level. Among its many benefits, continuity planning equips businesses with long-term resilience and stability, thereby safeguarding the interests of key stakeholders, enhancing brand reputation, and protecting the integrity of the company’s value-creation activities.
Why Do You Need a Business Continuity Plan?
Whether big or small, no company is immune to disasters, and that alone underscores the importance of a business continuity plan. Here are additional reasons why business continuity planning remains paramount to business performance:
- Early threat mitigation – A well-crafted business continuity plan enforced by a managed service provider in Washington DC can help mitigate potentially disruptive events facing the organization.
- Enhanced organizational reputation – Continuity planning instills a sense of confidence in the company’s operations and service delivery when employees and existing clientele can access crucial services during or immediately after a disruptive event.
- Minimal or no downtime – A comprehensive business continuity plan provides the steps for quick restoration of vital business processes. This means little disruption as your team doesn’t have to restore systems from scratch.
- Regulatory compliance – For compliance with certain regulatory requirements such as those highlighted under the PCI DSS, businesses need a continuity plan at minimum.
Having a comprehensive business continuity plan further levels the playing field, where small businesses can compete with larger enterprises including during a crisis.
Crafting a Business Continuity Plan
1. Identifying Core Business Functions
Core business functions such as sales and finance are most vulnerable to disruption. In the event of an unexpected disaster, these critical operations must be protected. However, the definition of a core business function is not tied to this particular category of activities.
Businesses have different categories of essential and non-essential operations depending on their vertical. A detailed analysis of the business’s operations reveals the most critical operations as these will be most vulnerable to disruption.
2. Risk Assessment and Management
Some risks often go unforeseen and may cause significant damage to the business’s operation and reputation when they occur. Unfortunately, business managers don’t have it easy pinpointing the exact risks that will befall the business, nor their timing. This necessitates a thorough assessment of potential risks, enabling business managers to set up measures in place to minimize their impact.
As established earlier, all potential risks facing your business should be identified. From natural disasters to engineered attacks, these potential risks and their impact on the business’s functions should be known long before their occurrence. The most severe threats such as cyber breaches should be prioritized and safeguards put in place to mitigate their impact.
3. Develop an Alternative Communication Plan
Communicating with staff and partners during and following a disaster keeps everyone in the loop regarding the status of the business’s restoration efforts. During a crisis, not all communication channels will be available. As such, your emergency response team should set up alternative communication channels to keep everyone in the know throughout the crisis.
Your business continuity plan should highlight the internal and external communication protocols during a crisis. Internal emergency alerts can be sent to all personnel via email, text, or instant messaging applications. Consider social media for external communication, e.g. updating customers on the status of the restoration process.
4. Test Your Business Continuity Plan Regularly
Testing your business continuity plan in the middle of a crisis is, without doubt, the worst time possible. Business continuity plans should be tested regularly to assess their efficiency should real disruption strike.
In this regard, employee awareness is paramount to the survival of the company; business managers have the responsibility to ensure that their staff is familiar with the company’s business continuity plan. Regular simulations of real-life crises enable employees to familiarize themselves with their roles when faced with a crisis and business managers to spot weak links.
5. Regularly Reviewing and Updating Your Plan
Unfortunately, natural disasters, system failures, network failures, and power outages have only increased in frequency over the years. Similarly, cyber attackers will stop at nothing to evolve their tactics. With these adamant threats, it is important to review and reassess your business continuity plan on an ongoing basis.
A business continuity plan should be reviewed annually, and every time after a major disruptive event. Some key areas of focus include existing IT infrastructure, regulatory compliance structures, and more importantly, cybersecurity posture.
Conclusion
In the end, business continuity planning is all about securing your business’s future with regular planning. And thanks to the existence of business continuity planning frameworks, such as ISO 22301, NIST 800-34, and NFPA 1600, organizations don’t entirely need to create their business continuity plans from scratch. If you still need help creating a continuity plan for your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch with a professional at Port Cyber today!