A well-devised business continuity plan will help carry your company through any number of disasters, with as little loss of data, money, and time as possible. Unfortunately, not all companies commit the necessary time and effort to creating a strong business continuity plan, and even among the ones who do, their plan may suffer from some flaws that would reduce its effectiveness.
Common flaws include the following:
- A lack of employee engagement. A recent article in Information Week highlights five reasons why employees may not cooperate with a business continuity plan, including the fact that they don’t know that one exists; they might also not be sure about what a ‘disaster’ really looks like or what it could mean for a business.
- Irregular updates. For a plan to be effective, it needs to be regularly revised and updated to deal with new developments in technology, any alterations you’ve made to your business organization and activities, and changes brought about by employees who are newly hired, leaving, or moving to a new position within the company.
- Unclear allocation of responsibility. In the event of a disaster, it’s important to be clear about everyone’s responsibility. Who would be responsible for managing different aspects of the recovery process? Who would have authorization to use certain passwords?
- Too few lines of defense. Ideally, your plan will have several lines of defense; if there’s a failure in one, another will kick in. For example, when it comes to backing up important data, it’s not enough to have it saved on a USB drive or on a server – what would happen if they become compromised or experience a failure? You could lose your data irrevocably, or have to waste days or weeks trying to recover it. Having secure cloud backup is an example of one key way you could give your data high-quality protection and enable easier recovery.
- A plan that doesn’t cover a wide range of scenarios. There are many possible ways that your business could experience a disaster, including power outages, cyber-attacks, and employee carelessness or deliberate malice. Your business continuity plan would have to cover all of those possibilities.
Devising a strong business continuity plan is best done with the assistance of experts who can help you evaluate the risks faced by your business and come up with powerful solutions. Contact us to discuss the best ways to keep your business operations running even in the midst of a disaster.