Photo by Mateusz Dach from Pexels
If you want your business to remain competitive even during an IT disruption, you need to self-reflect.
What’s your plan against the unexpected?
The truth is numerous threats can halt your business operations at any time. If your employees cannot quickly pivot to ensure IT business continuity, you won’t just struggle with competition, but with survival.
The simple solution is an IT business continuity plan (BCP).
Techopedia defines BCP as:
“An IT business continuity plan (BCP) is a plan to help ensure that business processes can continue during a time of emergency or disaster. Such emergencies or disasters might include a fire or any other case where business is not able to occur under normal conditions. Businesses need to look at all such potential threats and devise BCPs to ensure continued operations should the threat become a reality.”
BCP empowers your business to respond to disruption(s) that could potentially affect business operations. It minimises the impact of disruptions while also enabling you to quickly get mission-critical processes up and running with minimal or no data loss.
Being able to deliver services/products to customers despite calamities paints your business in a positive light among customers.
Essentially, BCP safeguards your revenue and reputation during a business disruption.
BCP will play an important role in a post-pandemic world. It’s likely your business will have to operate with a hybrid infrastructure, where half your employees will work from the office and the other half from pretty much anywhere.
Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash
A healthy IT business continuity plan should have the following components:
BCPs vary based on the requirements of an organisation’s industry and the unique needs of the business. However, there are a few components every healthy BCP should have.
1. Recovery personnel
2. Recovery procedure
3. Data backup
Your BCP should establish how to back up data as well as the methods used for backup and recovery. Depending on RTO and RPO, as well as the granularity of recoveries required (i.e., restoration of individual files), your methods may vary.
BCP testing gives you insights into how prepared your employees are in case a disruption occurs. It is a risk-to-reality simulation in which employees need to work together to find a solution and recover lost data, communications technologies, or damaged property.
To keep everything running smoothly, your business should test BCP at least once a year. However, the frequency of your testing largely depends on the nature of your business, turnover rates, rapid process changes, or new regulations.
On the surface, manual testing is important to maintain a business continuity plan that works during an actual disruption. The reality is that businesses struggle to match manual BCP testing with the frequency at which cyberattacks occur.
Confused about how to move forward with your business continuity plan and testing? Don’t worry. Boileau can help.
Contact us now to learn more.