4 Reasons You Need Business Continuity Planning

Are you a CEO? If so, you most likely care about business continuity for four key reasons.

Good business continuity and disaster recovery planning should look at the business as a whole – with a goal to develop business resilience. The severity and length of business disruptions caused by fires and flooding can vary considerably. To be prepared for extended or permanent facility damage, businesses should maintain continuous off-site backup of data, applications, and server images, as well as have arrangements in place for re-routing incoming calls to an alternative site and/or to employees’ mobile phones. Data is essential for all types of organizations today, so ensuring access to applications and data following a disaster is critical.

Still, it’s just one piece of the business continuity puzzle. Evaluating your company’s ability to restore IT operations can be a good starting point for company-wide business continuity efforts. In fact, many business continuity planning efforts start by conducting a business impact analysis or risk assessment—these studies can reveal weaknesses in your organization’s ability to continue operations that go far beyond IT.

4  reasons CEOs care about business continuity:

1. Downtime is really, really, expensive: If your employees or customers lose access to business-critical applications and data, there will be a direct impact on productivity and revenue. While this sounds obvious, many organizations do not consider the actual costs of downtime. Some modern business continuity products offer the ability to run applications from backup instances of virtual servers. This allows users to continue operations while primary application servers are restored. Choosing a business continuity solution aimed at reducing downtime makes good business sense.
2. Backup Alone = Not Enough! You’d be hard pressed to find a business today that doesn’t conduct some form of data backup. But, what happens if a flood wipes out your primary and backup servers? Sending a copy of data offsite for disaster recovery should also be considered essential. Historically, this meant sending tapes to a secondary location or tape vault. As previously mentioned, modern business continuity products can run applications from backup instances of virtual servers, and some can extend this capability to the cloud. The ability to run applications in the cloud while onsite infrastructure is restored is widely considered to be a game changer for disaster recovery. As CEO, you don’t want yesterday’s backup technology. Backup and business continuity are not one in the same. Your business needs both – all the time.
3. Disasters actually do happen – and they most times are not natural! Not every disaster is broadcasted on news and weather channels. Most IT downtime is a result of common, every day actions like accidental (or even intentional) data deletion, damage to computer hardware and poor security habits. For example, a CompTIA study found that 94% of respondents routinely log into public wifi, in spite of security risks. And, 69% of this group accesses work-related data over public wifi. A ransomware attack or virus can halt operations just as easily as a tornado or a power surge. These disasters are typically a result of human error, which in unpreventable.
4. Business continuity impacts everybody – especially your customers! Data is essential for all types of organizations today, so ensuring access to applications and data following a disaster is critical. But it’s just one piece of the business continuity puzzle. Evaluating your business’ ability to restore IT operations can be a good starting point for company-wide business continuity efforts. Good business continuity and disaster recovery planning should look at the business as a whole – with a goal to develop business resilience. In fact, many business continuity planning efforts start by conducting a business impact analysis or risk assessment—these studies can reveal weaknesses in your organization’s ability to continue operations that go far beyond IT.

Learn about CompuData’s expertise in Disaster Recovery!

Keep in mind, failure to protect your business from human error, hardware failure and/or natural disasters can be detrimental and impact every single stakeholder. Implementing a BCDR plan will help today’s CEOs sleep a little better at night. CompuData can help your business implement a BCDR plan that will protect business continuity in the face of disaster. Don’t wish you would have – actually implement a BCDR plan to keep your business productie – and revenue generating – despite any disruptive force.

Get your business continiuity planning started today! Contact CompuData!