Nature can be pretty impressive. It can interrupt the day-to-day operations of businesses, cause major damage, and cost your business in expensive downtime. Having a good business continuity plan (and ensuring you have it set in place) can make or break your company when mother nature comes knocking at your door.

Business continuity consists of many parts. It involves planning, preparation, education, and review (after all, you don't want to find out all of your flashlight batteries are dead as soon as you are stuck in the dark). In other words, implementing a business continuity model should happen before disaster strikes, not during a disaster.

Planning is Everything

At home, you probably have a first aid kit with some emergency equipment, like flashlights, batteries, and blankets. Unfortunately in order to ensure your business exists after a huge disaster like a flood or fire, you'll need more than just a few supplies. You'll need procedures in place defining how the company will respond to different types of emergencies, and how you will handle these issues without stopping your core operations. Organizations need to take a lot into consideration: how will you communicate both internally and to your customers?

Preserve your Data

Losing valuable company data in a disaster is often more expensive than losing infrastructure. A wall can be rebuilt, a roof can be shingled, and workstations can be replaced. Data, however, is the culmination of years of work put in by multiple employees. It's your bread and butter; your clients, prospects, leads, finances, invoices; it's your company history.

Equipping your IT infrastructure with a solid backup device is mission critical. We're not talking about saving important documents to email or storing things on a thumb drive. A business should be able to guarantee its data. The only way to do that is with a reliable backup solution that doesn't discriminate whether a file is open or not and saves all company data offsite on a regular basis.

Does it Pass the Test?

You can't expect to put a business continuity plan in place without testing it regularly. Have your plan tested regularly and review it to keep it up to date.

You don't know what will happen, but you can know that you won't lose everything, no matter the scale of the disaster. Need help implementing a disaster recovery/business continuity plan? Contact us at (203) 261-2201 and schedule a review of your business and what you need to prepare for an emergency.