What Is An IT Continuity Plan?
When we talk about an IT continuity plan we are referring to a business’s plan and procedures to restore critical functions in the event of an unplanned disaster. These events could be anything from a natural disaster, a service outage, potential threats, and even security breaches. An IT continuity plan helps your company resume normal business operations with very minimal downtown, which in turn saves them resources.
What Makes Up An IT Continuity Plan?
A successful and fully optimized continuity plan has three main components:
The first thing a company needs is to be resilient. This means that your business’s key functions are designed with potential disasters in mind. Your IT continuity team will run a risk assessment against each of your business’s key functions for any weaknesses that may be present. They will then establish a protection plan against these weaknesses to help prevent potential threats or natural disasters from occurring.
The second component is prioritizing functions and determining which functions need to be put into action first. Disaster recovery is extremely important and the quicker your assists can return to a state of operation the better. If your company is able to recover quickly it will also result in preventing any long lasting damage to your business and your business assets. After your most important business functions are back online your team will then work down the list of priority functions and implementing any recovery strategies that are needed.
The third and final component for an optimized and successful IT continuity plan is having a contingency plan in place. This plan should describe the chain of command, the responsibilities of key people in the business, and it should have any directions necessary for emergency management for each established disaster scenario. Your IT continuity plan should also include a recovery time objective, also known as an RTO- to establish how quickly your business’s operations need to be back up and running along with an impact analysis to determine just how successful the recovery efforts were. The impact analysis plan will also help you assess how you can improve your disaster recovery process can improve in the future.
These three elements are key to assessing damage quickly and recovering from any possible disasters quickly. When it comes to your continuity plan it is also very important to know that the plan is a living document that needs to be updated regularly. As time goes on your business may adopt new technologies and infrastructures that need to be adopted into your plan.
Reasons You Need An IT Continuity Plan
If the explanation of what an IT continuity plan hasn’t already convinced you that it is essential for your business then these ten reasons might:
It helps you anticipate catastrophes
Accidents don’t just consist of natural disasters, they consist of a wide variety of problems that could happen at any time. Your business could face an infinite amount of problems which is why disaster recovery planning puts measures in place to assist any disaster that may occur.
It helps you determine losses that happen during these low moments
It helps build your company’s reputation
A good continuity plan ensures that everyone involved is well informed on how they are supposed to react. Your customers are able to depend on the institution due to its ability to manage situations of all kinds effectively.
It maintains your employee’s determination and provides them with comfort
A work place is only as good as the employees within it and when your employees are comfortable with the decisions of management they are much more productive. Being assured of their safety allows your employees to be more determined and enthusiastic about work resulting in an overall increase in productivity.
It protects your customers
One of the most important reasons for a continuity plan is that it protects your most valuable asset, the customers. It is important for you to protect your customers when they visit your business and after they leave. You have to safeguard all of their data and ensure that it doesn’t get into the wrong hands. Your IT continuity plan helps you know what to do in case one of your customer’s faces threats within your business.
You are able to recover from any viruses
When you have a business that is exposed to a large consumer base competition can be very evident and if this competition is unhealthy it can lead to malicious behavior. Because of this your continuity strategy is there in order to ensure that you can recover any lost data or information in case of a crippling and possibly detrimental threat. Your plan assesses the backup solutions that are available in case of threats that are posed from malware and can cost your business to face extreme losses.
It helps you determine losses during low moments of the business
If times are tough the market can be extremely unresponsive, thus lowering the sales for most businesses. If your business is still new then the losses could be exponential. Having a continuity plan in place prevents you from incurring more losses and can even boost your business in the long run.
It creates better communication
Good communication is a major component of business success. Any lapses in communication can block the growth of your business and an effective IT continuity plan helps to ensure that your employees know exactly how to perform during any type of crisis, big or small.
But most importantly it gives you peace of mind
When you have an IT continuity plan you are able to run your business with little to no fear because you know how to bounce back if your worst case scenario becomes a reality.
Our team at Businets can help you create a plan to keep your business running in the case of disaster. Give us a call today for more information on our continuity services.