Planning for Business Continuity

People are usually great in a crisis, heroes appear, resolve the problems, get things back on track. But, why does a business have a need for heroes in the first place? A business should be forward looking enough to spot the potential crisis or outage. However, business continuity is far from sexy, particularly when everything working just tickety-boo.

So, business continuity planning is not just about having a plan for when things go wrong, it's central plank is to ensure that where there is business risk, appropriate mitigation is put in place. For instance, a business completely reliant on their CMS should have redundancy built in and no single points of failure whilst a business that uses a CMS in a small area of their business should not need such belt and braces. Horses for courses.

So, think of business continuity as two separate things:

• The pro-active removal or reduction of risk within the business and,
• Plans for dealing with a risk if it turns in to an issue.

Within the businesses technology infrastructure, there are three high level areas that need to be addressed:

• Single points of failure: If a single point of failure will significantly reduce the ability of the business to operate then it should be addressed, pragmatically. There's no point in implementing something that costs an arm and a leg that will only be used less than once a year.
• Siting of systems: Consider carefully siting of systems, for instance, siting an Email server in the office rather than the data-centre is convenient for staff, maybe, but if office internet links go down the company is far more cut off from the outside world than they would be if the Email server was sited in a data centre.
• Data back-up: This is simple: Make back-ups, regularly, keep an up to date set off site in a safe and secure place and test them regularly. It doesn't have to be sophisticated and indeed some of the cloud offerings are so cheap or free that it's a no-brainer nowadays.

It's not exciting, it's not fun, it's not even that interesting. But without business continuity planning, businesses can be sunk in hours. Technology should really take the lead on this now because so many business systems are reliant on their technology. If you need help getting your business continuity plans in place, GreenBOLD can help.