Business continuity planning is important when running a business. No business is immune to disasters. And it only takes a single disaster to force businesses to shut down permanently. With business continuity planning, you can protect your business from disasters, including cyber attacks. For a better understanding of business continuity planning and why it’s important, keep reading.
What Is Business Continuity Planning?
Business continuity planning involves the creation of a plan to ensure that a business can continue operating in the event of a disruption. This can include disruptions caused by natural disasters, power outages and even cyber attacks. The goal of business continuity planning is to minimize the impact of the disruption on the business and its customers or clients while also returning the business to normal operations as quickly as possible.
Also known as a disaster recovery plan, a continuity plan outlines the steps a business should take in the event of a disaster. A continuity plan focuses on “continuing” the operations of a business during and after a disaster.
How Many Businesses Have a Continuity Plan?
Not all businesses have a continuity plan. Some reports suggest that as many as three-quarters of all small businesses don’t have a continuity plan. Even larger businesses often neglect to create a continuity plan.
It’s not until businesses are struck by a disaster that they acknowledge the importance of a continuity plan. By that time, however, it’s often too late. A disaster can disrupt a business’s operations so that it’s unable to produce or sell its product or services. Rather than rolling the dice with your business, you should take measures to protect it from disasters by creating a continuity plan.
The Parts of a Continuity Plan
If you’re going to create a continuity plan for your business, you should include several parts. A risk assessment is an essential part of a continuity plan. The risk assessment should outline the potential threats and vulnerabilities to your business’s operations.
You should include a business impact analysis in your continuity plan. As the name suggests, this part reveals how the aforementioned threats and vulnerabilities will affect your business’s operations.
Another important part of a continuity plan is recovery. The recovery section focuses on the steps your business must take to recover from a disaster. For cyber attacks, you may want to include back up strategies in the recovery section. You can recover from many cyber attacks by restoring or reverting the affected system to an earlier date.