In order to optimize the growth of your business, you have to plan for the future. To this end, one of the most important steps that you need to take is to create a business continuity plan. Let's take a look at why implementing one of these plans is so valuable for your business, and how you can get your plan started today.
What is a business continuity plan?
A continuity plan is often mistaken for a disaster recovery plan, but they are not the same thing. A disaster recovery plan involves the restoration of any assets that were destroyed during a disastrous event. A continuity plan, on the other hand, doesn't consider how to restore damaged assets. Instead, it is a plan to keep your business up and running in the event that critical business resources are no longer functional or are destroyed. A complete continuity plan will factor in every business asset that you own, even including your company's building.
Why is a business continuity plan important?
Disasters happen. No matter where your company is located, a destructive fire, storm or even an earthquake can strike. Although putting everything back together is important, restoration of your destroyed assets shouldn't be the only thing on your mind when a disaster happens. If you stop operations completely, then everything that your business does from the moment of the disaster until full recovery will be a total loss.
A continuity plan will give your company the ability to continue earning profits throughout the entire recovery process. You never expect disasters to happen, but if you're prepared when they do, then you will be able to maintain a meaningful level of productivity while your business recovers from a disaster.
What steps should I take to create or enhance my business continuity plan?
At first thought, it can seem like an inconceivable task to continue running your business without a critical asset like your building, but it is possible. Here are the steps you need to take:
Create a comprehensive list of potential disasters
In order to plan to recover from a disaster, you have to know what it will be and how it will affect your business. That's why the first task for your business continuity plan should be to identify as many potential disasters as possible. You should consider anything that would cause a major or minor hindrance to your business operations. Here are a few examples:
- Earthquake
- Lightning storm
- Epidemic or pandemic
- Hurricane
- War or terrorism
- Cyber attack
Back everything up
You rely on your business' data. If this is destroyed in a disaster, you will have to start from scratch. You can prevent valuable data destruction from having such a massive impact by backing it up.
Although on-site backups are great, you should also have off-site backups. This will make your backup data invulnerable to any disaster that occurs at your business.
Put a remote operations plan in place
Thanks to modern technology, your entire team can continue working cohesively without being in the same place. To make this happen, you will first need to create a digital office that will be largely unaffected by the sudden destruction or displacement of physical assets.
In order to enable your team to remotely operate after a disaster, you will need three things:
- Cloud document management
- Remote document access systems
- Mobile document management applications
There are powerful document management systems that give you all of these capabilities.
Are you prepared for anything?
Keep your company up and running no matter what with an effective business continuity plan.
