Any disruption, big or small, can pose a significant threat to a business. Disasters are unexpected and can manifest in many ways. From a 2-minute power outage or even a cyber-attack, they can all halt operations and cause potential financial losses.
And because of the unpredictable nature of disasters, it’s really difficult, to estimate the potential losses derived from any business disruption. According to Datto, just one hour of downtime can cost thousands of dollars to a small business and upwards of millions to larger-sized corporations.
There is no way to fully prevent a major disruption, but there are effective approaches to lessen the impact of potential financial losses.
Instead of just waiting for the unpredictable to happen and hoping for the best, let’s proactively prepare to face the adversities, and there is no better way to proceed than with a Business Continuity Plan.
What’s a business continuity plan?
A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a document that refers to how a business can maintain its functions or quickly resume them in the event of a major disruption. It outlines the procedures and instructions that must be followed, such as contingencies for business processes, assets, personnel security practices, and every aspect of the organization that may be affected.
The complexity and level of detail that your BCP will have depends on the size of your business, but any BCP contains, in general, the following sections:
- An introductory section that shows how the plan is structured, the parts that compound it, and what are the main objectives that your company wants to achieve.
- A risk management assessment with business impact analysis.
- An Incident response plan with plan activation, along with information about who will conform the incident response team, what will be the ways of communication in face of a disaster, and a contact list.
- A schedule that shows when the plan will be tested, in order to perform due evaluations and verify if the plan will work as expected.
- The plan should cover how the business will handle IT disruptions to networks, servers, and personal computers. The goal is to reestablish office productivity so that key operations can be met.
Why is a business continuity plan so important?
As mentioned before, one of the main purposes of a BCP is to quickly restore IT systems inside an organization, so that the main business functions can still be done, and normal activities can continue.
Keeping downtime to a minimum is crucial in order to lessen financial losses. The rent, internet service, and insurance invoices will sum up at the end of the month, regardless of your activity levels.
So, let’s say that you own a small accounting firm, and you are in the middle of tax season, the busiest time of the year for any CPA. Business is firing up; clients come and go every single day.
One day you sit in front of your computer to check your daily emails, and this shows up on the screen:
Just imagining this situation makes would make someone faint. But thankfully, there’s a way out.
Since you took all the precautions and took the time to sit alongside an expert team like Connected 360 to design your business continuity plan, you’ll save yourself the trouble of paying the ransom. Remember, the Business Continuity Plan ensures that:
- Business data backups are taken periodically, for example, every 6 hours.
- The copy is stored for up to 15 days.
- You have at least three copies of the data stored in three different locations, one of them being on the cloud.
- You have access to all these copies.
- You have an expert team that gives you support 24/7.
You can make it out of a situation like this, only when the right strategies are taken.
Conclusion
It’s not about waiting for the storm to clear, it’s about taking a proactive approach and preparing a data backup strategy to prepare your organization if disaster hits. We can transform the way you do business and keep you running even in the most difficult situations. Contact us for a 15-minute consultation.
