Series Introduction – Business Continuity Planning Essentials
Data is essential for all types of organizations today, so ensuring access to mission critical applications and data following a disaster is crucial. However, business continuity and disaster preparedness are about so much more than that.
In other words, you might have important apps up and running somewhere, but that doesn’t matter if your office is underwater and your employees are at home without power. You need to consider the business as a whole in order to satisfy your customers needs following a disaster event.
The first step for many businesses is to conduct a business impact analysis (BIA). Detailed instruction on conducting a BIA is outside the scope of this series, but the point is to:
- Identify potential events that could negatively impact normal business operations,
- Calculate the likelihood that each event may occur, and
- Quantify the impact that the event could have on your business.
For example, if your data center is in Florida, a hurricane is a possible event; its likelihood is high (during hurricane season); and your business could be negatively impacted in a big way if downtime is significant. You get the idea. There are a wide variety of threats to any business ranging from natural disasters to security breaches to random accidents—a leaky pipe can have the same impact as a flood if it’s directly above a critical server.
Once you have that stuff sorted, you can move on to crafting specific plans for risk mitigation, disaster response and continuity of operations. In this series, you will learn four distinct but interconnected business continuity planning essentials.
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning should be considered a critical aspect of running a business. However, many organizations disregard it completely. Others have some kind of plan in place, but fail to grasp how time consuming the recovery process can be and the the associated cost of downtime. The good news is that today’s data protection technologies and services have greatly improved the IT piece of the business continuity puzzle. There are a wide array of options in the market today at different price points, which enables you to select a product or service tailored to your specific business needs. In fact, the easiest way to get started is to contact our Disaster Recovery Specialists who can help you create an effective plan right away.
The importance of testing business continuity/disaster recovery plans can not be understated. Testing is the only way to reveal gaps in your plans and address them proactively—not while you are frantically trying to pull the pieces back together after heavy rains deposited a foot of water in your lobby.