Data and IT disasters can prove highly disruptive to an organization. When business is disrupted, it can cost money. Lost revenue plus extra expenses mean reduced profits. Therefore, an IT continuity plan to continue working is essential in reducing the impact of an IT disaster.
We talk a lot about business continuity and disaster recovery for your business data, and it’s important to understand their differences.
What is a business IT continuity plan?
A business IT continuity plan is primarily proactive. It is a strategy outline and process by which a company can continue to operate no matter what kind of IT disaster or setback happens in your organization. On the other hand, an IT disaster recovery plan is primarily reactive and deals with how a business acts immediately following a disaster that would impact your organization.
Today we will cover the basics of a good business IT continuity plan. Next month we’ll tackle your IT disaster recovery plan.
Conduct a business IT continuity impact analysis
The first step in developing your IT continuity plan is to evaluate all areas where an incident would disrupt business operations. A review of all critical areas of failure and recovery time objectives gives you a good picture of how long your business will be impacted, depending on various scenarios, and what can be done to speed up recovery.
Outline recovery strategies
Recovery strategies are alternate means to restore business operations to a minimum acceptable level following an IT-related disruption. They are prioritized by the recovery time objectives (RTO) developed during the business IT continuity impact analysis. Depending upon the size of the company and the resources available, several recovery strategies may be available.
For example, if the router fails, it may be a quick fix where you’re only down a few hours. Whereas in the case of a server failure, it could be days or weeks for hardware to be ordered, configured, and data restored. However, should you have a backup appliance along with the service, a temporary server could be spun up in the cloud within hours, so your downtime is minimized.
Develop your plan
Organize your recovery teams; Outline who is responsible for specific parts of the plan and who needs to be notified in the case of an emergency. Develop a reaction plan along with those team members’ input. Write up the business IT continuity and IT disaster recovery procedures and document any manual workarounds needed.
Test and train your team for implementation
Conduct training with your continuity team and test your plan. Document any failure points or missing items and update the IT continuity plan to incorporate lessons learned from testing and exercises.
Typically, a copy of your IT continuity plan will reside with your IT manager or IT partner. However, key team members and your leadership team should memorize the basic outline of the plan in the event your physical location or server where copies of the plan on your end reside are unavailable.
With a plan in place, outlining all your critical IT points, and tested for security, you’ll have peace of mind should something happen that would disrupt the business operations. You don’t have to wonder how long you’ll be down & who’s responsible for getting things running again.
If you would like to learn how to get a business IT continuity plan in place for the technical aspects of your business, please reach out to our team.
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