The 5 Critical Components of Your Business Continuity Plan

Disruptions to your operations are no longer a possibility, but an inevitability. Situations like natural disasters, major IT failures, and security breaches happen every day for businesses all over the world, and you can bet that each of them is scrambling to minimize downtime to keep their reputations and bottom lines in check. What they might not know is that a business continuity strategy is at the heart of any successful recovery, and despite what you might think, it’s easier to carry out than you might suspect.

There are five pieces of a successful business continuity strategy, and we’re covering all of them today.

Business Impact Analysis

This is your foundational starting point. The first step is to figure out what your priorities are and the impacts of a potential disruption. Here are some of the factors you might want to consider:

• Maximum Tolerable Downtime: The longest time your business can remain inoperable before it starts seeing unacceptable outcomes.
• Recovery Time Objective: Your target time for restoration of business function.
• Recovery Point Objective: The maximum amount of data (measured in time) that can be lost during a downtime incident.
• Critical Dependencies: The processes, technologies, staff, and vendors your business relies on.

Your goal here is to prioritize processes and assign your resources according to the ones that will make the most impact on recovery.

Risk Assessment and Prevention

Now that you know what’s important, it’s time to think about the threats. This helps you mitigate them and determine what’s a realistic scenario you will have to prepare for.

• Threat identification - Building a report of all internal and external risks based on your business and its location.
• Vulnerability analysis - Determining the weaknesses present in your systems, infrastructure, and processes that threat actors can exploit.
• Preventative controls - Implementing measures including firewalls, data encryption, redundancies, and employee training to minimize the odds of a potential incident.

Your goal should be to dramatically reduce the number of incidents you could potentially encounter and minimize the impact of the ones you are more likely to face.

Disaster Recovery Plan

Your disaster recovery plan is where the magic starts coming together. It’s about focusing specifically on your IT infrastructure and the technology that keeps it running. You’ll want a documented and structured plan for all of the procedures involved with recovering your IT systems, applications, and data.

• Data backup and recovery - Your critical data should be backed up regularly, securely, and to an off-site location. Follow the 3-2-1 rule, which demands three copies of your data, on two different media types, with one copy off-site, minimum.
• Failsafe procedures - You’ll want a plan in place for shifting operations to a secondary data center, cloud environment, or backup system. You know… Just in case.
• Hardware and software inventory - You’ll need a list of all required technology, along with their required configurations.

The goal for this part of the plan is to meet your RTO and RPO as outlined in the first section of your plan.

Communication and Response Plan

You need clear, controlled communication to navigate any crisis. With this comes defined roles and responsibilities, a chain of command, and strategies for navigating the situation. Here’s what’s included:

• Incident response team - Assign specific people to lead the response with clearly defined roles.
• Communication protocols - Build templates and procedures for communicating with your business’ stakeholders.
• Internal - Include employee safety instructions and status updates.
• External - Tell your customers, vendors, partners, and be prepared with public statements.
• Emergency contact lists - Maintain a list of up-to-date contact information for all key personnel, emergency services, and vendors.

It might seem like a lot, but you want to minimize panic, control the narrative, and guarantee that you’ve done all you can to deliver timely, accurate updates.

Testing, Training, and Maintenance

A plan will only get you so far without testing if it works. The last thing you want is for your backups to fail when you need them most. Be prepared to test and validate your backups periodically to ensure your systems function the way they should. Here’s how you can prepare:

• Drills and exercises - Conduct a regular walkthrough, simulations, and full-scale operational test.
• After-action reviews - Document the lessons you learn from every test, real or not, to see if you need to make adjustments.
• Annual review and maintenance - Take time to review and update your plan. Do this at least once per year, as well as when there is significant organizational change.

We know this is a lot to consider, but honestly, that’s business continuity for you. It might be complex, but it’s important nonetheless. To make it less difficult to manage and more likely to succeed for your business, you can work with us at Suffolk Computer Consultants. Learn more today at 631-905-9617.