Help Writing a Business Continuity Plan
Every minute that your business is offline is expensive. While every business is different, you'll find some guidelines for projecting your downtime costs in this post. But there are other costs beyond dollars. Your reputation, for example, is hard to repair if you're not available when your customers need you and your company name is front-page news. No company wants to be responsible for delivering a lesson in security to the rest of its industry, as noted in the headline of a recent Forbes article about the Colonial Pipeline hack.
The best way to avoid these costs is through business continuity planning. That way, if any disaster strikes—from a ransomware attack to a hurricane—you know what to do, and you have the tools in place to keep your business running. With that in mind, let's look at the specific areas you need to address as you develop your plan—and how you can ensure it will be effective if and when it is required.
1. Assess Your Risks
Regardless of your company's size or structure, you need to understand where your risks lie so you can reduce or eliminate them. You'll want to list every potential threat to your business operations so you can consider how to mitigate those risks most effectively. Risk assessment should be a team effort, addressing every aspect of your operations and every kind of threat, including:
- Natural disasters
- Cyberattacks
- Ransomware
- Human error
- Unplanned downtime
- Power outages
- Data corruption
- System failures
- Hardware failures
2. Perform a Business Impact Analysis
As noted on Ready.gov, the business continuity planning process should include a business impact analysis that addresses lost revenues, increased expenses, regulatory impacts, and other factors. You'll also find a helpful business impact analysis worksheet on the Ready.gov site. As part of this analysis, you need to establish or update your recovery time objective (RTO)—the amount of downtime your business can tolerate—and your recovery point objective (RPO)—the amount of data your business can afford to lose before the impacts are just too great.
3. Identify Critical Systems
With a clear understanding of your risks and the potential impacts on your business, the next step is to identify those systems and functions that are mission critical. This list will help you ensure that these systems are prioritized for protection and recovery. As you build out your business continuity plan, mapping your network, hardware, and software topology and dependencies can be an invaluable tool for locating and troubleshooting issues, thus accelerating recovery.
4. Back Up Your Data
While you are already likely to be backing up your data in some form, your risk assessment and business impact analysis should give you a solid foundation for choosing the most effective backup strategy and solution for your needs. At a minimum, you should adhere to Arcserve's recommended 3-2-1-1 backup rule: Keep three copies of your data, in two types of media, with at least one copy offsite, in the cloud, or securely stored, and one copy in immutable storage.
5. Plan for Recovery
Every business continuity plan should include a disaster recovery (DR) plan. Your plan should account for procuring the technologies you need to meet your RPO and RTO. It should also designate your recovery strategy—from file-based recovery to virtual machine (VM) and cloud-based recovery. StorageCraft, an Arcserve company, offers Cloud Disaster Recovery that ensures business continuity, no matter what.
6. Test Your Plan (Regularly)
If you need to put your business continuity and disaster recovery plans into action, there's no time to waste. It's essential to test your plan to ensure it will perform as expected if disaster strikes. StorageCraft Cloud Services allows you to test (or start) a site-wide failover process by pressing a single button.
Conclusion
There's a lot to consider when developing your business continuity plan. And when it comes to backup and disaster recovery, it's worth talking to an expert. Schedule a demo with a StorageCraft engineer and get the product information you need to make an informed decision.
Source: https://www.arcserve.com/blog/6-steps-developing-business-continuity-plan