4 Steps to a Solid Business Continuity Plan Did you know that fewer than 50% of businesses currently have a business continuity plan, yet every year one in 500 data centres suffers a severe disaster? Click here know more about plan continuitĂŠ activitĂŠ A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a solid and comprehensive contingency plan that can be triggered should your company suffer a disaster. Drawing up a BCP need not be a painful task, but it will help you avoid being one of the 43% of businesses that never recover from a serious crash.
The biggest problem companies face when dealing with a disaster isn't actually the resulting downtime but the serious beating their reputation can receive. In an age when almost all business flows through your IT systems, trust is everything. If you can't demonstrate that you're able to protect one of your most valuable assets (data) then your customers will likely oust you faster than you can say Usain Bolt.
To make sure the IT side of business continuity isn't leaving you chewing your nails, Managed Networks can provide a complete BCP and disaster recovery service allowing you to get back up and running within 8 hours using our servers - a service that is guaranteed.
A good BCP, however, is not just about your IT systems. The fundamental aspect to any BCP is, in fact, your staff. If your staff are well trained as to what action to take in an emergency and carry out these actions quickly and effectively then you will likely save your reputation, and in turn your business.
So all things told what steps should you be taking toward a complete and comprehensive BCP?
1. Prioritise and plan
Start by listing every day-to-day activity you carry out from collecting the morning post to international conference calls. Then, assign each a priority depending on the time you can survive without them - critical, material and desirable.
Map out your departments, staff, job roles and interdependence between departments. Always ask yourself "what would I do without this person?" to make sure your business, and your continuity plan, is properly resilient.
Once you have these activities categorised and mapped it is much easier to see where your potential risks lie and what systems must be introduced as a contingency in a crash. Using the priorities you can plan to protect the most critical parts of your business first and make best use of limited resources.
2. Communicate and train
Making sure your staff know what they personally need to do in case of emergency is critical to the success of your BCP. You should involve everyone in BCP, and make sure that continuity is part of their day-to-day responsibilities.
Of course as roles change and new staff are hired, training for those roles must continue.
3. Test
An untested plan is worse than no plan at all. Most businesses can't afford a full interruption test (where you really do turn off your main systems and rely on the backups) but you can combine walkthroughs and discussion with testing of specific aspects of your plan.
Above all, test that your backups are actually backing up; that you can retrieve the data from them in usable form; and that you can do so quickly enough. Remember that paper needs no power and no computer - sometimes the simplest backups are the best.
4. Review
Your BCP is only as good as its most recent review. The longest you should leave your review is a year, but doing it more frequently provides even more security and peace of mind. Visit plan de continuitĂŠ d'activitĂŠ to know more about