Do You Have A Business Continuity Plan?
Use our checklist to help protect your organization against costly unwanted downtime!
Get started with Business Continuity
Business Continuity and Business Continuity Plans can be very detailed and sometimes overwhelming to start. The main purpose of having a Business Continuity Plan in place is to help businesses avoid easily preventable downtime and costly damages. A Business Continuity Plan does this is by proactively identifying all threats of potential downtime within your organization and, describing all the details on how to address those situations. After all, prevention is better than trying to recover from a massive outage.
If your organization already has a Business Continuity Plan, that’s great! But it’s still important to periodically go over what you have and, both before and after downtime, revise your Business Continuity Plan for any weaknesses or missing areas where processes can be better defined in the event of unexpected situations. That’s why having a Business Continuity Plan Checklist can be extremely helpful for your organization, especially if you’re just starting work on your own plan. When it comes to Business Continuity, the ultimate goal is to be proactive instead of reactive if and when disaster strikes. Because it can be challenging to know how to get started when writing a Business Continuity Plan, it’s best to start with a strong foundation of the basics. This means understanding what Business Continuity is and how Business Continuity Plans are meant to serve a business.
80% of organizations DO NOT have a Business Continuity Plan
Don’t be caught unprepared.
What is Business Continuity?
Business Continuity is all about preparing for unforeseen circumstances and having a firm grasp on how to deal with those difficult situations before they arise.
If you wait until you experience downtime, you’re too late and likely have wasted time and money to troubleshoot a situation you could have either entirely prevented or at least minimized with Business Continuity. Unforeseen situations can widely vary from employee injury to damaged equipment, to cybersecurity attacks and so much more.
For Business Continuity to be successful, it’s vital that time, money, and resources be assigned to investments that will support continuity planning for years to come.
It’s important to think of your Business Continuity Plan as a real-life application. A Business Continuity Plan is a written list of procedures that outline exactly how to handle potential threats before they spin out of control and lead to costly damages or even bankruptcy.
Business Continuity Plans should determine what employees or departments are responsible for what kinds of situations, as well as what resources are available and more. It’s important to have a well-developed Business Continuity Plan, no matter how many employees or assets you’re protecting because, with it, you can prevent, manage, or at the very least minimize damages caused by unexpected threats that might otherwise put you out of business. In fact, Business Continuity Plans are even more beneficial for small to midsize businesses and startups because small and new businesses typically have fewer funds and resources to dedicate to reactive disaster recovery and repairs.
In order to build a startup into a successful organization, you must begin by protecting any and all existing investments. Regardless of the size of your facilities, Business Continuity is extremely important for ensuring your doors stay open and customers remain satisfied as much as possible.
Business Continuity and Business Continuity Plans typically cover a huge range of categories such as protecting employees from injury, to preventing damage to physical equipment, ensuring building and facility security, offsite emergency planning, and the list goes on and on for proactive Risk Management.
Depending on the location and size of your staff and facility, your organization’s Business Continuity Plan should consider how to properly respond to geography and any extreme weather conditions that apply in your area, as well as pandemics that can lead to your business being short-staffed or having to entirely work remotely. Making your Business Continuity Plan as comprehensive and complete as possible will improve your overall Business Resilience.
30% of all downtime is caused by environment factors.
Temperature, humidity, water leaks, power loss and more can spell disaster for your organization if you are not proactively monitoring your environment.
Business Continuity Planning
It’s important to start Business Continuity with the proactive planning steps which set up the framework for how your business handles potential disaster. Planning includes identifying a person or group of people who are responsible for understanding and implementing Business Continuity. It is also important for your Business Continuity Plan to be a written, well-constructed document. A successful plan is one that is extremely clear on the protocol for threats of downtime and also that is distributed to your entire organization so everyone is on the same page so they know what steps to take, should an event occur.
It is critical that all processes vital for the organization to function properly are explicitly addressed in your Business Continuity Plan, which will allow you to then identify the potential threats of downtime specific to your facility. This is where the focus can change depending on your conditions, and usually includes environment-related downtime such as power loss, flooding, and high temperatures as well as data loss, equipment failure, pandemic, severe weather, and employee injury just to name a few. You should also conduct a Business Continuity Impact Analysis to address questions such as “How much money can we afford to lose during an hour of unexpected downtime?”
Technology
Outside of Planning, Technology plays a big role in Business Continuity because most organizations depend on their Technology in order for operations to function properly. You should start by identifying any preexisting tools you have such as building alarms, security cameras, smoke detectors, environment monitors, and power generations. Next, look at areas in your organization where little or no equipment exists to prevent or minimize downtime.
You should not only look to see what equipment you have, but also ensure that all equipment is clean, plugged in, and otherwise working correctly.
Depending on your geographic location, you should also consider severe weather that could negatively impact your network such as hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, or wildfires that your business should be prepared to encounter. Again, identify if you have any data backup and protection already in place. If so, regularly test that everything works correctly. You should also verify your internet connectivity, your employees’ ability to work remotely and communicate via whatever platforms you use, and more in the event that your staff may not be able to physically work onsite.
Then you need to actively list key equipment that should be checked in the event of an emergency. This means confirming firewalls and any licensing subscriptions are accounted for and up to date. Any antivirus software you rely on should also be reviewed to confirm it is up to date. With this, a simple component that is often overlooked is ensuring all passwords and log-in information are easily accessible to staff that requires system access. Any and all key equipment is important to consider because if just one factor is forgotten, your entire Business Continuity Plan is jeopardized and likely not able to fully deliver on its job of preventing downtime.
Communication
As the structure of your plan begins to build and become more complete, it becomes increasingly important with each step to consider how it affects your plan as a whole.
For example, planning and technology are vital to Business Continuity, but without proper communication, downtime can still lead to disaster for your organization. All staff needs to have up to date information on how to contact each other, so this information should be regularly reviewed and checked for accuracy.
It’s important that every employee has a clear understanding of how they play a part in the organization’s overall Business Continuity Plan. Work with your staff to identify any potential points of failure, such as internet connectivity at employee homes, or employee-owned devices that they may be working remotely with in order to make sure your staff is well-equipped to handle any situations that may arise.
Recovery & Review
In the event your organization does experience downtime, it’s important to review the steps you took to recover as quickly as possible. Inevitably, you will identify areas that need to be addressed further in order to enhance your protection in the event of potential future downtime.
After you’ve invested all the time, resources, and money into developing your Business Continuity Plan, it is vital to routinely revisit your processes and ensure that your procedures are updated and as proactive as possible.
Download Our FREE Business Continuity Plan Checklist Today
This free Business Continuity Checklist is a strong, all-inclusive example of taking proactive steps to protect the assets, employees, and resources that your organization relies on. We hope that this checklist helps to outline all of the complex factors that work together to minimize all forms of costly downtime within your business, organization, and facility.
For more information about Business Continuity and how to protect your organization against costly environment-related downtime, visit AVTECH.com or email Sales@AVTECH.com.