The ability to continue critical operations during an unplanned disruption is vital for modern businesses. These unplanned disruptions can stem from adverse weather events, severe cybersecurity incidents, third-party vendor outages, and human error. You can’t control unexpected events, but you can control how you respond to them. This article highlights six best practices for business continuity at your business.

The Costs of Business Continuity Events

The prospect of an outage that threatens the ability to continue running essential business operations is a daunting one. Gartner estimates the cost at $5,600 (€4,750) per minute of IT downtime. This figure varies across sectors, but there is no doubt that a business continuity event has the potential to inflict enormous costs.

A large proportion of the significant costs of a business continuity event come from the loss of revenue, lost customers, and reduced employee productivity. Consider an eCommerce business selling products from their website—each minute the website isn’t available to potential customers means you can’t sell your products and those prospects will find another business to buy from. Businesses that suffer an extended disruption are likely to suffer further reputational damage in today’s demanding customer environment. Business Continuity Best Practices

Here are six best practices for business continuity.

1. Make A Plan

Having a solid business continuity plan is the key enabler of resilience in responding to unexpected disruptions to business services. Without a documented plan, your response is likely to be uncoordinated and chaotic. Not having a plan in place makes swiftly recovering important business services is extremely unlikely, which worsens the costs inflicted by unexpected disruptions.

A business continuity plan establishes clarity about the processes for responding to adverse events, the roles of different employees in responding, and the communication protocols if primary communication mediums are taken offline.

It’s important to get strategic buy-in for business continuity plans from the top down if your plan is going to have any impact. Make sure you consider your specific industry when drawing up a plan to ensure everyone is on board with it. For example, if you’re a small online business with a mostly remote workforce using cloud infrastructure, you probably don’t need to be planning for the impact of a flood.

2. Know Your Vulnerabilities

A crucial part of business continuity is to have a complete picture of the key risks and vulnerabilities your business faces. The objective is to understand what processes and assets are critical to business operations and in what ways are they at risk. Every business has limitations in budget and personnel, which means that it’s not practical or sensible to address every possible adverse event or risk to every business process.

Hone in on the key systems that support your business and list all the ways they are at risk of disruption. Knowledge of these vulnerabilities provides the foundation for putting in place appropriate response strategies that can get these business systems online and protect important business assets as quickly as possible.

3. Choose Recovery Strategies

It’s essential to carefully choose and plan your recovery strategies as a business continuity best practice. Documenting the business and technology responses is the number one way to prevent a panicked response in which your business scrambles to identify what systems to prioritize and how to recover them after an unplanned disruption. Furthermore, analyzing the available recovery options helps you choose the most practical options in the face of previously identified vulnerabilities and constraints on the available budget.

The following are some points to think about when opting for recovery strategies:

• Communication redundancy—it’s wise never to rely on one communication method. If your team primarily communicates by email, make sure to have at least one more communication method that doesn’t depend on a functioning email system.
• Limit single points of failure—when choosing recovery options, such as data backups, don’t rely on a single vendor.
• Adequate environmental safeguards—even in a remote world, most businesses retain some sort of centralized office presence. It’s important to put in place adequate safeguards against various hazards at your physical business location, including fire extinguishers, smoke alarms, and even anti-flood defenses if that’s a risk in your area.

4. Use Automation

The human component of business continuity can’t be neglected, however, the best business continuity plans incorporate automation throughout. Automation enables agility and efficiency, both of which help to rapidly restore affected business operations in the aftermath of a flood, fire, cyber attack, or any other unexpected event that takes systems offline.

This automation should be software-driven, with disaster recovery services handling processes such as backing up data and initiating cloud failover as soon as critical systems or apps become unavailable.

5. Leverage Cloud Infrastructure

Most modern businesses are driven by technology even if they don’t consider themselves technology companies. For example, a small local dental practice depends upon the availability of IT systems to manage patient appointments and records. Given the inextricable intertwining between business processes and IT systems, it makes sense to focus heavily on restoring those IT systems in the event of an outage.

One of the best uses of cloud infrastructure is running cloud-based applications that don’t depend on on-premise systems. You can still access cloud-based applications from a laptop even if your company’s IT systems experience an outage.

Another way to use the cloud is as a failover option to build redundancy into your critical applications and infrastructure. Cloud failover servers can immediately restore and run crucial business applications in the event of an outage so that your most valuable business operations are minimally impacted by a business continuity event.

6. Test and Update Your Plan

It’s a mistake to think that once you have a documented business continuity plan, you can assume it will remain functional over the lifetime of your company. The right approach is to treat a business continuity plan as a living, constantly evolving document that you update in line with your evolving business dynamics.

Taking a recent pertinent example, many companies experienced a radical shift to a mostly remote workforce during the Covid pandemic. Any business continuity plan in place before that pandemic would need to be updated to reflect this altered dynamic. To ensure business continuity in this landscape, companies would’ve needed to put in place solutions that ensured high availability and failover for remote access services, such as VPNs or cloud-based applications.

A regular testing program ensures that the recovery solutions and workflows you have in place actually work. There’s nothing worse than experiencing a genuine outage only to find that there’s a problem that prevents the resumption of key business operations. The prevailing wisdom is to conduct a high-level test at least twice per year to identify any gaps in your business continuity plan.

Wrapping Up

Successful business continuity requires a strategic approach and a mindset shift that prioritizes business continuity as central to ongoing business operations rather than as a form of insurance against unlikely events. The global pandemic taught businesses in all industries that these unlikely events shouldn’t be an afterthought. Unplanned events are always a risk, and being prepared can pay dividends.

If you need help implementing a business continuity strategy at your business, contact iPing today.