Everyone knows that all businesses need a business continuity plan, but not everyone can spend time creating one.
The problem is that these plans require the right decisions to be made when the time arises, and this process can be difficult without the right knowledge or toolset. If you want to save yourself some of the hassle involved with creating and maintaining business continuity and IT disaster recovery plans, you should consider outsourcing your needs.
In this blog, we’ll look at everything you’ll need to know about a business continuity plan as well as the benefits of outsourcing it.
What is the Purpose of a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a framework for establishing and maintaining an organization’s ability to recover from disruption. It typically includes policies, procedures, guidelines, and standards for dealing with emergencies, disasters, and other situations threatening your operations.
Business continuity planning is also called disaster recovery planning, an extension of business continuity planning. The two terms are often used interchangeably. The plan covers the actions you need to take and the resources you need to have available to continue running your business as usual in the event of a disaster.
For example, if your workplace were damaged by fire or flood, your BCP would help you decide what you need to get your systems and organization back up and running as soon as possible.
A good business continuity plan will include:
- Information about the different types of risks you face, such as fire, flood, power outage, or cyberattack
- Steps you will take if each risk occurs
- A point of the person responsible for making decisions during an emergency
- The method of communication with employees and customers
- Estimating the time employees return to work after a major disruption.
When Does a Business Continuity Plan Kick In?
A business continuity plan’s goal is to ensure your company can continue running its operations after any disruption — even if the disruption lasts for several days or weeks. The plan includes procedures for dealing with emergencies, finding temporary office space and equipment for employees who might not be able to get to work, and communicating with customers and other stakeholders.
A BCP is part of an organization’s overall business risk management strategy — it’s not just about IT or technology issues. It includes plans for dealing with events such as:
- Fires, floods and power outages
- Human resource issues such as employee absences or illnesses
- Regulatory compliance issues
- Supply chain issues
- Financial matters such as cash flow management
- Reputation management; legal issues; media relations
- Environmental concerns such as hazardous materials spill or chemical leaks
- Public relations issues
- Community relations issues and
- Even pandemic preparedness.
Why are the Main Reasons to Develop a Business Continuity Plan?
To Protect Your Business from Disaster
A disaster can wreak havoc on your business. A fire, flood or another major incident could close your business for good if it isn’t equipped to withstand such an event. When you use business continuity services, you can protect your company from the effects of natural disasters or artificial events such as cyber-attacks and power outages.
To Minimize Business Interruption
Business continuity services like backup and disaster recovery services include an array of resources that you can use to recover quickly after an emergency strikes and minimize interruptions in service for your customers. These resources include backup facilities, disaster recovery plans and computer systems designed to withstand any failure and keep your operations running smoothly even during a crisis.
To Reduce Costs Associated with Disasters
A disaster can cost your company significant amounts of money when a disaster strikes. For example, if your data center floods and causes damage to equipment or other assets inside, it may take weeks or even months for repairs to be completed — leaving you without access to critical information needed for day-to-day operations.
IT disaster recovery services help reduce costs associated with these situations by ensuring that there’s always someone available who can step in and ensure everything runs smoothly.
Help You Meet Compliance Requirements
Many industries have compliance requirements that should be met to remain operational within those industries. For example, financial institutions must meet specific regulatory requirements to continue operating as financial institutions within their region or state jurisdictions.
With IT disaster recovery services that include compliance measures, you can ensure that your company remains compliant with all applicable laws and regulations even during a crisis.
Protecting Your Data
Data loss can be devastating for any business and can threaten your business’s very foundation. With a well-planned BC plan in place, you’ll be able to protect your data from natural disasters and other types of damage that could result in data loss.
Why Do You Need to Outsource Business Continuity Plan?
Is outsourcing business continuity important when running your own business?
Very much so. With the growing number of businesses outsourcing their services, it is no surprise that many have started looking for a reliable business continuity plan provider. This is because they want to make sure that their business will be able to continue operating even in the event of an emergency. There are many reasons why you need IT disaster recovery services and a business continuity plan:
Reduce the Time Taken for Recovery
The key benefit of outsourcing a business continuity plan is that it will reduce the time taken for recovery. When you outsource a BC plan, you can get professionals who are experts in this field and who are well-versed with all the latest tools and technologies required to make your business recover faster from any IT disaster. This means that they can offer you 24/7 support whenever a disaster strikes.
Leverage the Skills of Experienced BC Experts
When you outsource a business continuity plan, you can leverage the skills of BC experts who have expertise in handling critical incidents affecting businesses of all sizes. These experts have new ideas for improving your BC plan and making it more efficient.
You can also seek their advice on implementing cost-effective solutions that will help your business recover faster from any IT disaster. Doing so will allow you to save both time and money while ensuring that all your critical systems are protected at all times.
Save Time and Money
Business continuity planning is a complicated process and it can take up a lot of time if done if the right person doesn’t handle it.
Also, creating a plan from scratch can be very expensive, especially if you are not experienced in doing so. If you outsource the plan for IT disaster recovery services to any of the experienced IT consulting firms, it will save both time and money for your company. You do not need to hire extra people just to create this plan; instead, you can hire professionals who already have experience and know what they are doing when it comes to creating such plans for other companies.
Include Latest Technology to Fuel Fast Recovery
Business continuity plans should include technology that helps speed up recovery efforts during disasters or outages by using the latest technologies of cloud computing, remote access, etc. With a BCP outsourcing company to help, you can ensure that you have all the right tools and technologies to ensure that the system recovers as fast as possible.
The Process Involved in Business Continuity As A Service
- Business impact analysis: This step involves identifying critical assets and functions, as well as their dependencies on other assets and functions. The objective is to determine how much downtime each asset or function can withstand before it becomes unusable or irreplaceable.
- Identification of risks to BC plans: The data recovery and business continuity company will identify all the related risks, including those that are external and internal.
- Identification of recovery strategies: The team will analyze and plan an individual recovery strategy for each risk identified during the business impact analysis step, along with recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). An RTO is an organization’s target amount of time it expects to resume normal operations after a disruption; an RPO is an organization’s target amount of data loss that can be tolerated during a disruption before resuming normal operations.
- Creation of disaster recovery documentation: This document will outline all the essential steps for recovering critical systems after a disaster hits, along with operational continuity and resilience steps.
Implement a Data Backup and Recovery Services
Business continuity planning is a vital part of strategic management in every organization. So if you have any kind of service-oriented business, then it makes sense to think about how your organization will continue even if some kind of disaster strikes.
If you’re looking for a reliable company to outsource business continuity planning, then look no more than our experts at Layer One Networks. We provide end-to-end managed IT services with a business continuity plan, including IT disaster recovery services. To discuss your need for data backup and recovery services, contact us now.