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
For more help with your business continuity please contact Guy Rigby on 020 7131 8213 or email Guy Rigby
Disclaimer
By necessity this briefing can only provide a short overview and it is essential to seek professional advice before applying the contents of this article. No responsibility can be taken for any loss arising from action taken or refrained from on the basis of this publication. Article correct at time of writing.
Contact usThis document is part of the Entrepreneurs' Toolkit series, produced by Smith & Williamson and external contributors. More information on this and other toolkit topics is available at www.smith.williamson.co.uk/entrepreneurs
