NCET Biz Tips: Business Continuity Planning Essentials
NCET helps your explore business and technology
Marco Romero
By Marco Romero
Keeping care of your clients is always important in all situations but becomes even more essential when your business is faced with a disaster, whether it be natural or man-made.
Protecting the essentials in your business, whether it be the safety of your employees or your critical business data, is paramount. There needs to be a plan in place to make sure that you know exactly what needs to be done when a disaster does occur.
Disasters can be defined as anything that will disrupt your normal business operations, whether it be a fire, flood, theft, or Ransomware, which has been in the news quite a bit lately.
Business data is essential for all organizations, so ensuring access to mission critical applications and the data it relies on is critical. I am sure you have heard the term “Business Continuity” before but what does it really mean? How do you apply its principles to keep your business running in the event of a disaster?
More importantly, how do you take care of your clients when a disaster strikes your business? If you cannot continue to do business with your clients, the possibility of going out of business is very much a concern. Here are some areas that should be in your Business Continuity Plan.
Employee Safety. Depending where your business is located determines a lot on how you will protect your employees when a disaster occurs. The type of business involved definitely plays a role as well.
Communication. What means of communication will you use to communicate not only to your employees but to your clients as well. How will your clients be able to reach you when disaster strikes? Your email server mail be down and the possibility of sending out a large number of emails to employees and clients may be difficult. If you are large enough, you might have redundant email servers at different locations, but this is not true for most companies.
Getting Back to Business. How are you planning on running your business if you cannot get to your facility? How are you going to notify clients about how you are now going to conduct business during this period? The shorter the time you must be back in business increases the cost of preparing yourself in the event that the disaster takes place. If you know that you can afford to be closed until things clear up, then again, the expense is much less. There are technical terms to define these concepts but I will not get in to that now.
Your IT infrastructure is essential to keeping your business going, no matter what the size. Backup Disaster Recovery has come a long way in the past few years. It is sort of like a Fire insurance policy. Instead of protecting your facility, you are now protecting your business data. You need to ask your self the question “How much will it cost me to recover it, if it has been destroyed or not accessible?”
Learn more about business continuity planning at NCET’s Biz Café on Aug 21 at NCETcafe.org. NCET is a member-supported nonprofit organization that produces educational and networking events to help people explore business and technology.
Marco Romero is President and Owner of Biz-Net with over 30 years of experience in computer related fields. (Biz-Net.com)