Why Businesses Must Plan For Business Continuity to Survive and Thrive

Businesses can be affected by natural or man-made disasters or emergencies without notice. It is common knowledge how businesses are disrupted by tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and myriad of other natural events. Since these events happen once in a while, most business managers are lulled into a state of complacency thinking that they themselves would never have to deal with the impact of one. However, there are a number of more commonly occurring events like fires, storms, heavy snow, power outages, and accidents involving hazardous materials that can affect not only profitability but also employees, and customers. Having a business continuity plan in place is essential to minimize the impact that these disasters and emergencies can have.

Why Is Business Continuity Planning Critical

The ability of any business to recover from an emergency is directly related to how much business continuity planning has been done before the incident. According to industry experts, it has been observed that 40% of businesses affected by disasters go out of business in less than five years of the incident. It is vital for business continuity plans to be put into place for all types of industries that require their operations to be uninterrupted and transparent. The importance of these strategies is increasing with the adoption and reliance on technology to conduct business. As more and more emphasis is placed on information technology to support customer transaction and communication or even to manage logistics and supply chains, businesses are becoming less tolerant to loss of information due to disasters.

Custom Planning Is Mandatory

Most businesses appreciate that business continuity planning needs to be customized as per the requirements of the business and that adopting a generic plan will not work out. In order to maintain operational continuity, the plans need to be tailored to risk perceptions and scenarios that have been specifically identified as being relevant to the business. These could range from a failure of local systems right up to the loss of the office building. Since such risk analysis is normally outside the capabilities of the IT department, it is best to look at specialized IT support Bay Area companies.

Threat Identification

Contemporary threat perceptions have gone beyond natural disasters and emergencies to include cyber-terrorism, hacker infiltration, and malware attacks. The diverse nature of risks faced by contemporary businesses has made it even more critical to maintain continuity of operations and effectiveness. Among the prime concerns of CTOs are hacker intrusions that can jeopardize the entire business operations. To counter such threats, it is crucial to conduct a thorough risk analysis and organization-specific focused security testing of the entire information technology and networking infrastructure.

When an incident forces a business to shut down its IT network, it is imperative to make sure that the concerned employees are able to retrieve access to the system as soon as possible in a secure manner. In order to make this possible, a corporation can deploy an assortment of solutions that can automate many procedures involved in network management. Despite the increased focus on business continuity planning, it is evident from studies that only a third of all businesses have managed to implement a comprehensive disaster management and recovery plan; the rest remains alarmingly vulnerable. Businesses need to urgently appreciate that there is a very high cost to staying unprepared for the worst. If a disaster strikes, at best there could be a major financial loss but at its worst, the business could sink.