By
Rod Crowder
MD OpsCentre and Business Continuity and IT Disaster Recovery expert
Recovery strategies help to keep the critical aspects of your business running, maintain the operation of production facilities, ensure the safety of employees, and communicate with your clients.
A strong incident response plan: Back to ‘business as usual’
Consider this scenario...
An electrical storm struck your premises last night, resulting in a complete power blackout. Your employees arrive at work today to find the electricity off, the backup generator failed to kick in and the building is in darkness. IT equipment and phone systems are unavailable, machinery isn’t running and there’s concern about the whereabouts and safety of the night-shift employee who would have been working during the storm.
Employees outside the building start getting phone calls from customers, suppliers and other team members and an air of confusion is developing about the extent of damage. None of the senior management team is available and Emergency Services are suggesting that it could be days before they grant access to the building.
Without a business continuity plan in place, this scenario would be catastrophic for the business.
This particular scenario may not ring true for your business, but good business continuity plans will keep your company operating through interruptions of any kind. Think about how badly affected your business would be and how quickly it could get back to ‘business as usual’ following severe power failures, an IT system crash, a natural disaster like floods or fire, or supply chain problems.
Preparing a risk management plan ahead of time ensures the hard decisions and careful thinking have been done in advance, so employees simply have to follow a pre-set strategy, rather than get in touch with management and wait for a hurried response.
Plan and be prepared with risk management
The development of your business continuity plan follows after you have conducted a Business Impact Assessment to determine what’s critical and what needs to be recovered.
Your business continuity plan must be practical and usable in both a testing situation and a real disaster incident. For most small to medium-sized businesses, a single document covering the following should suffice:
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emergency management plan
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crisis communications plan
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business continuity plans
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IT disaster recovery plans.
Consider that in the event of a disaster involving a building evacuation, you may not have time to locate paper-based continuity plans from within your workplace, so copies may need to be available outside.
Senior executives could keep a copy of the continuity plans at home, or carry them at all times on an encrypted USB key. Also, plans can be stored on the Cloud. With access to a laptop, the plans are readily accessible.
Specialist software tools simplify the development of continuity plans and their ongoing maintenance. They have the added bonus that all plans are centralised and easy to locate and distribute. Obviously, it’s essential to be able to easily locate the most current plans during a disaster incident.
Ensure you include the recovery timing of critical business processes, the resources needed and the people responsible for them.
If you need to build IT disaster recovery plans for your IT infrastructure and applications, articulate where the recovery will take place, which systems and applications will be recovered and in what order, and what underlying resources are needed (IT hardware, software, networks and data). Include IT team members responsible for each task, and make sure to keep these plans updated as your company and team expands.
Ensure business continuity
Ensure your plans focus only on business continuity and recovery tasks to be enacted following an incident.
Most effective continuity plans start with either a checklist or flowchart on the first page, followed by sections outlining response tasks, based on the type of incident or impact that’s occurred. Don’t clutter the plan with reams of management information and project background, or with anything other than vital information related to actually responding to a disaster.
If you want to keep track of project background information such as the past recovery strategy options, who’s been trained in business continuity management, when the plan was last tested and so on, create a business continuity management framework document. This can be available for interested people to read at leisure.
Aim to keep your plans succinct and practical. Use references to information that changes regularly rather than directly embedding it within the document. For example, employee phone numbers and company asset details are most likely already maintained outside the business continuity planning project, so simply refer to their location within your continuity plan.
You won’t have to update this information in multiple places, creating an unnecessary maintenance overhead and introducing more possibility of errors.
Rod Crowder
MD OpsCentre and Business Continuity and IT Disaster Recovery expert
OpsCentre Founder and CEO. Specialties include Risk and a Resilience, IT Recovery, Business Continuity and Cyber Security solutions: Consulting, Software and Training.
