You and your team have put everything into building your successful company. The last thing you want is for some unexpected disaster to bring normal operations to a grinding halt. That’s why having a business continuity plan in place can be as vital as landing new customers.
A solid continuity plan outlines procedures your company needs to keep critical functions running if and when catastrophe strikes. Think cyber attacks, fires, floods, equipment failures, pandemics, political unrest—all fun stuff. By preparing for the worst, you give your business its best shot at bouncing back when unlucky knocks arrive.
Crafting an ironclad continuity plan does require some dedication upfront. But consider it an investment to bulletproof what you’ve built. Here are key steps to put a plan in motion:
Size Up Your Risks
Start by brainstorming threats that seem plausible for your location and industry. Assess the likelihood those events could occur along with the level of disruption they would cause. Rank the risks by priority level based on their damage potential. Those emergency scenarios most likely to cripple key operations should warrant extra mitigations later in your plan.
Spotlight Critical Areas
Focus your continuity planning on the specific business activities absolutely vital to survival and recovery if systems go down. Revenue-driving operations probably rise to the top. Functions tied to regulatory or legal compliance also tend to rank high. Identify gaps where a lack of continuity would crack open the door to fines, lawsuits, or loss of crucial permits.
Set Recovery Goals
Define your objectives for restoring disrupted operations by establishing Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). An RTO indicates how fast you aim to rebound in the worst case scenarios—say within 24 hours or 3 days. Hard goals help drive concrete continuity strategies when the pressure’s on later. Of course you’ll want to bounce back as quickly as possible. But set realistic RTOs based on colleagues’ input across your company locations.
Map Out Backup Procedures
Document step-by-step instructions needed to maintain essential functions if your game plan gets thrown for a loop. The clearer your continuity playbooks, the smoother teams can act in the heat of crisis.
Outline both short and longer term workarounds. Make sure responsibilities are distributed across trained employees as backups for key roles. Identifying manual solutions upfront—say shuffling operations to an alternative site—builds important redundancies into systems and prevents choke points.
Choose Your Tools
Once you’ve documented how critical business processes operate normally, assess ways to provide redundancy and rapid fail over. Common continuity strategies include:
- Backing up data remotely to enable recovery
- Arranging overflow workspace or equipment
- Failover clustering servers with automated handoff
- Mirroring websites and apps on alternate hosts
- Offsite storage for duplicate documentation
Build out enough emergency capabilities to meet your Recovery Time Objectives even if your infrastructure or workspace gets hit.
Practice for Problems
Schedule tests of your continuity plan under controlled conditions—like fire drills but way less fun. Once everyone’s familiar with response procedures, pressure test them with no notice shutdowns. Shoot to break things so you can assess what continuity policies proved robust and where the plan needs reinforcement.
Make updating continuity processes part of your company’s regular routines. Review once or twice a year. Incorporate lessons from each near-crisis conquered to keep your strategies aligned with the business’s changing shape.
Disaster can strike when you least expect it. But developing continuity disciplines before calamity arrives lets companies concentrate on serving customers rather than scrambling for damage control. Spend the time now so you can bounce forward faster if, knock on wood, catastrophe comes calling at your door.
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