Did you know that 16 March is “Everything you do is right day”? If you have the right disaster recovery plans in place and are confident that your business continuity is robust then this is a great reason for you to celebrate. For those small business owners who haven’t thought about business continuity planning before, now is the time to get your own preparations underway. But what is business continuity planning and why is it the right thing to do?
Wikipedia defines business continuity planning as ‘the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. In addition to prevention, the goal is to permit ongoing operation, before and during execution of disaster recovery.’
There is a clear distinction between disaster recovery planning, which is about dealing with the immediate aftermath of a disaster and business continuity planning, which looks at the longer term prevention of disaster, mitigating the impact of such an event and survival of a business.
The key to prevent a disaster from happening in the first place is to undertake a risk assessment of your business, looking at all potential threats and aspects of risk that could present themselves. Given different factors relevant to your business, ask yourself what might go wrong and how can you prevent that from happening in the first place? For example, are your premises at risk of flooding? What are the chances of human error causing downtime? How dependent is your business on IT systems and processes and do you have a back up?
By looking at all aspects of your business and considering the impact of anything adverse happening, you can quickly build up a picture of the risks you face and, from there, create a plan to help combat these threats.
If you’re unsure how to go about this or need some help getting started, you can take a look at our article on the 4 stages of developing a business continuity plan. There are also plenty of templates of business continuity plans available online which you can use to guide you through the process.
Your disaster recovery plan will form part of your overall business continuity strategy. If you take the protection of your business seriously, employing the services of a specialist disaster recovery supplier is an important element of your disaster recovery plan. First Recovery provide specialist support to small businesses and SMEs. In the chaos that comes in the immediate aftermath of disaster, their experienced experts provide the focus, reassurance and calm that the situation requires. They quickly restore services and get your business back on its feet again. In a very short space of time, they will turn a very wrong day in to one that looks much more right.