Business owners invest a tremendous amount of time, money and resources to make their ventures successful, yet emergency planning may get placed on the back burner in the face of more immediate business concerns.
At some point, your business will be disrupted by either a man-made or natural disaster; it’s not a matter of if, but when. Disaster recovery planning is vital to the longevity of the business.
Natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes and floods are particularly tricky to plan for because they can strike randomly and sometimes repeatedly in the same geographic location.
So how would a business survive such extreme threats? Here are a few leading practices and strategies to help:
- Awareness: A critical activity of Business Continuity actually occurs before the crisis. Informing and educating employees about programs, threats, expectations, accepted behaviors and actions will increase the likelihood that the intended response to an emergency will be achieved by making these situations at least a bit more familiar by way of repetition.
- Compliance: Compliance with building code safety and frequent building code inspection checks are imperative to ensuring that your building is as safe as possible. The same method should be applied to information technology. Extreme caution should be taken when it comes to protecting your most valuable business resources.
- Redundancy: A variety of sources for accessing information should be available. Emails, website postings, “800” numbers to recorded messages, face-to-face information sessions, newsletters, and texting are viable methods.
- Frequency: During crises information changes quickly. Therefore, it is important to update messages frequently. Having a pre-established update schedule will benefit your organization during the business interruption.
- Communications: Often times at the beginning of a crisis there is a flurry of information, which then drops off. Crises can last for a while and people need different types of information from stage to stage. Maintaining communications continuity during all stages of a crisis is critical.
Patrick R. Dunn, CBCP, CISSP
Practice Manager – Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity