It is almost 1934 years ago to the day that Mount Vesuvius first erupted, causing catastrophic damage to the city of Pompeii. While few disasters compare to the wrath Mount Vesuvius cast on its unsuspecting residents, it serves as a constant reminder that unexpected dangers are everywhere and that businesses should be prepared.

While protecting against man-made and natural disasters including earthquakes, floods and IT mistakes may not save you from being buried under ashes, it can be the difference between business life and death. Helping to save you money and reputational damage – insurance doesn’t cover all costs – it can also prevent customers from defecting to the competition. The last thing any business wants.

Having a business continuity plan helps you pre-empt, plan and even prevent~unexpected events such as website downtime [link to 24x7 website monitoring] and avoid the things that can destroy a business just as quickly as Pompeii. It will also help you establish IT disaster recovery procedures that outline how your business will continue functioning in the event of a crisis and help save the day.

Steps to putting together a Business Continuity Plan:

#1 Business Impact Analysis

A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) follows a risk assessment and helps you identify the operational and financial impact a disruption of business functions and processes could have. Such impacts may include lost sales and income, expenses relating to outsourcing or overtime and lost orders. Survey managers and others within the business to find out how~loss or disruption of their services or functions would affect them.

#2~Recovery Strategies

The BIA will help you see whether you see whether your current strategy (if you have one) is fit for purpose, or whether there are gaps between your requirements and existing capabilities. Explore, select and implement strategies that will help you best recover critical business processes and functions such as online ordering in the event of a crisis such as an IT system failure or power cut, but do this with managerial involvement.

#3 Plan Development

Getting involvement from others is essential as you’ll need to organise recovery teams. These potential firefighters can help you put on paper such things as relocation plans and help you write the business continuity procedures so you’re fully equipped to manage business disruption.

#4 Datacenter Disaster Recovery

Clear on what needs to be done in the event of a crisis, you now need to review your data recovery toolkit. This might include looking up data storage costs and third-party hosting and, for businesses backing up inhouse, moving to Cloud storage. Advanced DR solutions such as Continuous Data Protection (CDP) can be particularly helpful in the event of key data becoming compromised. This facilitates recovery to any point in time. You should also check your datacenter has a DRP. They too can be subject to a disaster.

#5 Testing and Exercises

Test and train; these two words are absolutely vital for an effective Business Continuity Plan. Conduct training for the business continuity team to ensure they fully understand the plan and procedures. Testing and exercises also needs to be done to evaluate recovery strategies and~will help to reveal such things as resource gaps, and if you have a relocation address as part of your plan, whether it can be configured in time to meet the planned recovery time objective.