To maintain profitability, it’s imperative that you continue business operations in the face of disruptions, like power outages, natural disasters, and cyberattacks. Since disruptions are inevitable, having a business continuity plan is the best way to safeguard against these and other issues that may halt your operations.
What is a business continuity plan?
A business continuity plan is a proactive framework that guides your responses in the face of unforeseen disruptions that will negatively impact your business. For instance, it tells you what to do, whether you get hit with ransomware or by a hurricane.
A business continuity plan will generally be outlined in a comprehensive, detailed document that covers various aspects, like risk assessment, recovery strategies, and a plan for each potential disaster. For example, if your transformer fails, you might have a plan to replace it through a manufacturer that offers retrofitting to reduce downtime.
Following the procedures set forth in your business continuity plan is one of the only ways to ensure minimal downtime, protect your reputation, and preserve your profits.
Business continuity plan benefits
Ultimately, the main benefits are reputation and profit protection. This is achieved through minimizing downtime and avoiding costly consequences. For example, after a disruption, a business continuity plan will drastically reduce the time it takes to resume normal operations. You won’t have to figure out what to do on the fly. Your document will outline the steps you need to take to restore critical business functions fast. The sooner you can get back up and running, the less money you’ll lose.
Other benefits include:
- Keeping customers happy. Keeping your business operations going will keep your customers happy. For instance, if you run a retail shop online, you could lose thousands of customers if your website goes down. If you’re running a manufacturing plant, downtime will put all your customers behind schedule and they probably won’t use your services again.
- Maintaining continuous revenue streams. Every hour of downtime costs you money. You can’t afford to skip creating a business continuity system.
- Protecting your brand’s reputation. The more downtime you experience, the less reliable you appear to others. Nobody should know when your business is hit with a disruption. You should have a plan in place to keep it going without hassle.
- Maintaining legal compliance. If you are required to have a business continuity plan under federal or state regulations, the importance goes without saying.
- Maintaining employee morale. Employees want to know the company they work for has a plan for potential disasters. They don’t want to be left stranded or held responsible for incomplete tasks that were disrupted outside of their control.
How to create an effective business continuity plan
There are five main components to a solid business continuity plan: risk assessment, impact analysis, recovery strategies, plan development, and training and testing.
Risk assessment
You’ll need to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities that might cause disruptions to your operations. For example, hurricanes, lightning strikes, cybersecurity attacks, and operator error.
Impact analysis
Once you have a list of potential vulnerabilities, you’ll want to identify the impact they might have on your business in terms of profits, operations, and brand reputation.
Recovery strategies
Each potential disaster scenario needs a strategy that details how you’ll recover. For example, you might have agreements with your team for cross-department coverage, backup systems to engage, or protocols for the IT team to follow.
Plan development
Everyone on your team needs to know their roles and responsibilities during the recovery phase.
Training/testing
Regular testing will help you discover errors and weaknesses in your recovery plan. For example, test your backup and restore plan to ensure your data can be fully restored.
Speaking of backups, backing up your data is one of the most important elements to include in your business continuity plan.
Make multiple, daily data backups
Backing up your company’s data on a daily basis to at least two separate storage devices should be a priority because some files won’t be recoverable otherwise. For example, say you get hit with a ransomware attack and one of your marketing team members can no longer access the data on their computer and the hacker is demanding a payment of $5,000 in cryptocurrency. Without a backup, you’ll have to pay the hacker and hope they release the data, or do without important files.
When part of your business continuity plan includes daily backups of all your files, you won’t even need to consider paying the hacker in this case. All you’ll need to do is reformat the computer’s hard drive (or get a new one) and restore all data from a backup made prior to the infection.
If it’s too much, hire a professional
If creating a business continuity plan from scratch seems daunting, hire a professional consultant. They’ll get you set up correctly, and once you know what you’re doing, it won’t be hard to maintain.
