When the sky is falling on your business, can you make it through the storm? For the average business owner, business continuity is looked upon as a secondary system that is put in place to protect the investments the business has made. Since the platform doesn’t have much to do with a business’ day-to-day operations, often times some aspects of a business’ continuity strategy are overlooked; a major mistake that the business owner will realize when it is suddenly too late. Understanding the elements of a comprehensive business continuity strategy is advantageous for any business owner or executive that is tasked to ensure the business’ operations are sustained. To design a solution that is right for your organization, you will first have to pinpoint the elements that make up a successful continuity strategy, and thoroughly implement them. Why Enact a Business Continuity Plan? The fact is that your company’s health is a human issue. A healthy business that supports numerous workers not only provides a good or service to consumers, it provides food, shelter, transportation, education, and more for the people employed there and their families. This is true for every business, which is why it is crucial to have some assurances in place when tragedy strikes. When data is lost or when systems that these people and their families depend on fail, there needs to be a strategy to get operations up and running again fast. Whether you have two employees or two thousand, operational sustainability is crucial to every single one of their livelihoods. What are the Elements of a Business Continuity Strategy? A working and thorough continuity strategy is not just a set of protocols that are enacted when something terrible happens. It is a continually changing, fluid strategy that will allow you to sustain operations through any number of issues that have the potential to hinder your organization’s progress. Each element of a continuity strategy is the direct result of another element, while being the cause for another. Element I – Initiation In the initiation phase of a business continuity strategy the concerned party needs to determine what exactly the objective of the continuity plan is, the general scope of the coverage under that plan, and who in the organization is going to carry out the protocol’s outlined in the plan. Element II – Analysis In the analysis phase, you will conduct a business impact analysis (BIA) and a threat and risk analysis (TRA), and as the plan begins to come together the analysis of any impact scenarios that have been carried out allows an organization to adjust the other variables to best protect against the major threats. The BIA will essentially separate the critical organizational functions from those that aren’t critical to the sustainability of operations. Once those have been determined each critical function will be assigned a recovery point objective (RPO) and a recovery time objective (RTO). The recovery point objective of a function is the acceptable amount of data loss that the organization can allow, while the recovery time objective is the acceptable amount of time it will take to restore the data needed to sustain operations. Under the BIA, an organization will also want to identify a maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPOD). This is the maximum amount of time that an … Continue reading Understanding Business Continuity