You must self-reflect on your business continuity plan if you want your business to remain competitive even during a disruption. What’s your plan against the unexpected? The truth is that numerous threats can halt your business operations at any time. If your employees cannot quickly pivot, you won’t just struggle with competition but with survival. The simple solution is a business continuity plan (BCP). A business continuity plan (BCP) helps ensure the business can continue during an emergency or disaster. Such emergencies or disasters might include a fire or any other case under normal conditions. Companies must consider all potential threats and devise BCPs to ensure continued operations.
BCP Benefits
BCP empowers your business to respond to disruptions (s) that could affect business operations. It minimizes disruptions’ impact while enabling you to quickly get processes up and running with minimal or no data loss. Delivering services/products to customers despite calamities paints your business positively. Essentially, BCP safeguards your revenue and reputation during business disruption. BCP will play a role in a post-pandemic world. Your business will likely have to operate with a hybrid infrastructure, where half your employees work from the office and the other half from anywhere.
BCP Components
A healthy business continuity plan should have the following components: BCPs vary based on an organization’s industry requirements and the business’s unique needs. However, there are a few components every healthy BCP should have.
- Recovery personnel: A dedicated individual should be assigned to manage the recovery process to get systems back up and running quickly.
- Recovery procedure: The recovery procedure outlines the strategies to restore key business functions and helps to prioritize assets critical to business operations. These assets include equipment, systems and contact lists. To protect critical assets, classify them based on their criticality to the business and define recovery objectives such as Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
- Data backup: Your BCP should establish how to back up data and the methods used for backup and recovery. Your methods may vary depending on RTO and RPO and the granularity of recoveries required (e.g., restoration of individual files).
The Reality of Testing
BCP testing gives insights into your employees’ preparedness for a disruption. It is a risk-to-reality simulation in which employees must work together to find a solution and recover lost data, communications technologies, or damaged property. Your business should test BCP at least once a year to keep everything running smoothly. However, your testing frequency largely depends on your business’s nature, turnover rates, rapid process changes, and new regulations.
On the surface, manual testing is important to maintain a business continuity plan that works during an actual disruption. In reality, businesses struggle to match manual BCP testing with the frequency of cyberattacks. Cyology Labs can help you build a robust defence strategy that safeguards your business and future. That’s why having a strong cybersecurity partner by your side can be the ultimate weapon in your arsenal—partner with us to leverage advanced technology. Contact us today to schedule a no-obligation consultation at www.CybersecurityMadeEasy.com
