Steps To Building A Business Continuity Plan

At this point most organizations are well aware that they need a solid disaster recovery plan for major incidents. When thinking about the problems that can occur from a major disaster, many organizations overlook the less disastrous (yet more common) occurrences such as snowstorms, power outages & blackouts, or even a simple office move. Having a plan for these instances, as well as major disasters, will ensure business continuity.

In a recent publication from MindShift Technologies, they discuss how the cloud can help companies overcome business continuity shortfalls and avoid lost revenues.

“The costs of business discontinuity can be staggering. When your servers go down, or your employees can’t get to the office or access mission-critical applications, your company is losing productivity. Revenues can take a hit. Vital data may be in jeopardy. And you run the risk of long-lasting damage to your brand.

Cloud computing has made business continuity easier to achieve than ever before. Today’s scalable, virtualized cloud infrastructures allow businesses to connect their entire IT environment, including physical servers and their network, to a public cloud, and manage it there. In fact, some companies can even fail over their IT operations to multiple cloud infrastructures”

They’re absolutely right. The cloud and cloud infrastructure has made it easier for businesses to continue functioning at normal capacity no matter what happens. Business continuity isn’t just for major companies such as the Fortune 500. All business from small to medium and so on should employ a business continuity plan and make it known to critical employees.

So, what steps should a company take in order to create a successful business continuity plan?

• 1.Get The Executive Team To “Buy-In”: In short, this means getting the higher-ups in the organizations to agree to have a plan in place and build a team to devise the plan.
• 2. Perform A Risk Assessment: Assess your company’s current risks to infrastructure.
• 3. Conduct A Business Impact Analysis: The business impact analysis is conducted along with the risk assessment and is an in-depth study of an organization’s infrastructure, business activities, departments, and all their interdependencies.
• 4. Identify Critical Systems & Functions
• 5. Backup Data Via The Cloud
• 6. Set RPO/RTO Goals:For many years 48 hours was considered acceptable timeframe to have data restored and business back up and running. These days, many organizations have goals of less than 24 hours, sometimes even a matter of minutes.
• 7. Leverage Server Virtualization
• 8. Establish The Role of Employees
• 9. Set Clear Expectations With Users
• 10. Test, Test, and Test Your Business Continuity Plan

The last few steps may be some of the most important. A virtual “fire drill” of sorts to make sure everyone is on the same page and knows what their role is and what to expect should their be a need to execute your plan.

This may seem like a lofty or even costly endeavor, and that’s a main reason why many organizations fail to create good business continuity plans – much less a plan at all. However, you don’t have to go it alone. Neovera is an expert technology partner who can help you not only build a business continuity plan, but can support your cloud infrastructure to ensure your business runs as efficient as possible.