Planning for business continuity
The Challenge
Where do I start in planning for business continuity?
The Solutions
- Analyse your business and rank your business needs in terms of priorities
- What business processes have to be back up and running within
- minutes or hours?
- 24 hours?
- a week or more?
- Do you have any regulatory constraints?
- Identify and prioritize risks, such as power interruption, natural disasters, insider threats and physical, as well as cyber or terrorist attacks
- Develop strategies and draw up plans to reduce or prevent those risks
- Do you require permanent alternatives for your critical IT services and communications?
- Is your critical data backed up, check your data recovery strategy matches requirements?
- Do you need uninterruptible power or generators to keep your electronics functioning?
- Analyse your personnel requirements, ensure that non-IT areas are involved
- Put together recovery teams with defined personnel, roles, functions and hierarchy
- Do all your key recovery teams work in the same place? If something happened to that building, you could lose all of your talent and your ability to recover
- Facilities and HR will be critical
- Analyse your communication strategy
- Do you have access to contact information for your staff, key service providers, regulatory bodies, press agencies and other appropriate contacts?
- Do you have a communication cascade structure or call tree in place?
- Finally, test your plans
- Review your business needs and priorities
- Walkthrough the plans
- Test your IT recovery procedures
- Test your communication plan
- Ensure your plans are known about by all staff
Contact usThis document is part of the Entrepreneurs' Toolkit series, produced by Smith & Williamson. More information on this and other toolkit topics is available at www.smith.williamson.co.uk/entrepreneurs
