In 2018, a malicious virus penetrated the City of Atlanta, causing significant disruption. Disruptions to the city’s computer networks caused interference with services such as police and court paperwork, parking, and utilities. Workers were forced to complete paperwork by hand.
The City of Atlanta ended up losing an estimated $17 million from the cyberattack, though only $52,000 was required to be paid in ransom.
Atlanta was unprepared, having outdated technology and various IT security issues.
An account of a German telecom corporation demonstrates what transpires when a plan goes as intended. When personnel discovered that a fire was moving closer to one of their important establishments, they used their emergency management network to alert and get people as well as responders ready.
The swift response of the German business was made possible due to a dependable disaster recovery plan and a duplicated network setup, which had the site operational again in no time.
The German company had a robust business continuity plan in place, which resulted in improved emergency management and the capacity to quickly recuperate.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan outlines the steps necessary to maintain operations during or rapidly resume them after a significant event, whether it be a natural disaster (ex. extreme weather) or a technological problem (ex. cyberattack).
Whether you’re the proprietor of a local business or part of a large corporation, making an arrangement for business continuity will enable you to answer quickly when setbacks occur, lessening their repercussion on your business.
Not having a strategy in place can make it hard to keep selling and sending out items during unforeseen interruptions. It is probable that your return to normalcy after these unanticipated problems will take a lot more time and do so ineffectively, which could have damaging consequences for both your income and your company’s standing.
Top Threats to Business Continuity
Depending on your company and the amount of danger involved, each brand will be faced with distinct primary potential dangers to their operations. It is beneficial to conduct a risk assessment before constructing a business continuity plan.
It’s crucial to have a strategy for any outcome; however, there are some typical issues that may stop operations that need to be identified.
- Global pandemics.
- Natural disasters.
- Utility outages.
- Cybersecurity.
4 Characteristics Guiding Your Continuity Planning
It is possible to evade certain significant interruptions, but there will always be a chance for something unexpected to occur. It is imperative that you have an organized course of action for recouping your business when a calamity occurs.
Comprehensive.
It is not realistic to think that you can be prepared for any and all disruptions that may arise, but it is still worthwhile to attempt to do so. Don’t assume your first plan is going to work. Be sure to have alternative strategies and contingency plans in place. Think about all possible variables and assume that something will eventually go wrong.
Realistic.
You don’t want to end up in a crisis and discover that the preparations you made can’t be implemented as expected. Think practically about the scheme you have constructed and make certain that it has as many backup plans as feasible.
Efficient.
It is understood that business can be complicated, therefore it is not reasonable to assume that your business continuity plan has to be uncomplicated. It must be done in an effective manner utilizing the resources currently available. The additional pressure and demands during a period of calamity or disruption can make common chores even harder to finish. Make sure this is accounted for in your plan.
Adaptable.
No written words could ever equal the surprise changes that the environment or other unforeseen circumstances might bring. Provide some flexibility in your plan so you can modify it if needed – changes may happen even very quickly. The plan should include regular oversight of the situation and provide an excellent starting point for dealing with the problem.
Creating Your Ecommerce Business Continuity Plan
Constructing a business resilience plan is, acknowledgeable, likely not the most enjoyable day you’ll spend at the office. It is essential for a business to survive that its continuity team and staff members take business continuity planning seriously. This is a significant component of operating a reliable business.
Identify the objectives and goals of the plan.
Business continuity management encompasses more than just IT systems and the related IT department, covering essential parts of the business environment such as operations, human resources, public relations, and others. The primary goal of establishing a business continuity plan is to maintain key business activities functioning or reduce interruption as much as possible.
Establish an emergency preparedness team.
Choose a few managers or leaders from different departments, as well as anyone else who could contribute ideas of value. Be sure to assign someone to be in charge to help the process move along and make necessary decisions.
Perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis (BIA).
This is where you’ll be able to pinpoint the most significant dangers that could affect your enterprise, followed by a thorough investigation and examination of these issues. Speak with the team about the consequences of having to cut down on, alter, or remove vital services or activities. Ensure that you record all recognized problems and their consequences on the business.
Identify essential ecommerce business functions.
Work out how your business would keep essential operations running in the event of an emergency. You must have blueprints for the following required duties and activities.
- Inventory management and supply continuity.
- Order fulfillment and shipping deadlines.
- Ecommerce platform functionality.
- Maintaining customer service.
Prepare a plan for each essential function/service.
Your ecommerce engine runs as a combination of parts, including:
- Customers.
- Team members.
- Suppliers/ subcontractors.
- Inventory.
- Shipping.
Review and make sure every business function has been addressed.
Do not forget to include any business operation in your plan, however, some may need to receive a higher priority when searching for strategies to utilize during a disruption. You’ll want to make sure you’ve documented the following:
- Level of business risk.
- Impact on employees and customers, and how you’ll communicate with them.
- Emergency policy creation.
- Financial resources can be tapped into in the event of a disaster.
- External organizations or community partners who can work together with you to be mutually beneficial.
Train staff, test, revise, and update the plan.
Show your plan to everyone whose opinion matters, and be proactive by conducting test runs to ensure that each component of the plan runs smoothly. This can be used to spot any omissions or flaws. Once any improvements have been put in place due to the comments you have received, you should provide instructions to every employee so they are up-to-date.
5 Critical Business Continuity Plan Objectives
Objective 1: Identify Disaster Recovery Personnel
Figuring out who will make up the employees in your emergency recovery team is a major objective of your business continuity planning. Some of the questions that need to be addressed are:
- Who is on those disaster recovery teams?
- What are their roles?
- How can they be reached in an emergency?
- Who are the alternates in the event the designated primary is unavailable?
Assigning someone to be the crisis management coordinator is one of the most important responsibilities when managing an organization’s disaster recovery. This individual may also be labeled as the emergency response director. This individual is given the power to make choices and is in charge of initiating the plans for recovering operations and taking the lead in restoring business operations. The coordinator is also the one who must keep in contact with the firm’s insurers concerning policies associated with disasters, including the organization’s cyber security insurance plan, which is very important to reduce the economic effect of a disaster on regular activities.
Objective 2: Assess Risks and Impact
A major reason for having a BCP is to recognize the numerous potential dangers both inside and outside your business by performing a risk assessment. The business impact analysis will evaluate potential disasters that could have a negative effect on the company, assessing the amount of harm each incident could cause, the time necessary to restore operations, the financial losses from the disruption, etc. The results of the risk assessment will be taken into consideration in the analysis.
The BIA serves as the cornerstone for the subsequent stages of the Business Continuity Plan. The results of the business impact analysis stage serve as the foundation of your recuperation tactics, continuity schemes, and upgrade routines.
The BIA works to establish connections between internal business processes and with vendors and customers in order to identify areas that may become disconnected and to determine the potential consequences of this. In a Business Continuity Institute (BCI) article entitled, “Why the BIA Provides the Foundation Stone for Business Continuity,” the author states:
It never ceases to astound me the complex system of components that build an agency, and it can be difficult for single teams to comprehend how they assist in the progress and mission of the company. I compare it to a fragile ecological system where all elements must collaborate together smoothly in order to maintain efficiency and productivity. When you make alterations or take away elements of the company, either by restructuring or through an occurrence, that system becomes upset and so we need to recognize what effect it has.
Business continuity advisors can be helpful in guaranteeing that all connections are revealed and debated. These outsiders have the potential to recognize connections that people working in the company may not spot, due to their proximity to certain activities, which could have substantial outcomes for the business and its customers.
The BIA leads to the formation of the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and the Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) as part of the plan. These two metrics are defined in the following way:
- RTO – The amount of time in which, following a serious event or outage, a business process and its associated applications must be restored in order to prevent a defined amount of impact.
- RPO – The amount of data that could be manually recovered following the restoration of an application following a serious event or outage.
Determining the metrics is essential since they are utilized to form the groundwork of your recovery plans.
Objective 3: Outline Existing Preventive Measures
A business stakeholder wants to understand what steps the organization is taking to stop the occurrence of a ransomware attack, similar to the one recently reported in the news. That is why a Business Continuity Plan is crucial. This text will discuss the systems, tools, and procedures that are available to prevent or reduce damage from a catastrophe. The analysis of preventive measures comprises technologies for both backing up data on-site, as well as cloud services.
By exhibiting to all personnel within the company’s continuity planning organization what resources are extant, the preventative measures examination provides a way of reaching an accord between employees regarding what expenses the company must spend on additional protective steps. Often referred to as gap identification, the method will generate unity among the staff so the results from the Business Continuity Plan may then be utilized as a way to appeal to decision-makers in order to obtain the funds essential to enhance the organization’s durability.
Objective 4: Provide the Step-by-Step Protocols
Your plan will outline the precise steps that must be taken to help with recovery. It is likely that in the event of an emergency, people will have forgotten what their responsibilities are. Your disaster teams should have a general concept, but if needed they will be able to consult the document to go through the specific steps as they are detailed.
Right now, it is essential to separate a business continuity plan from a disaster recovery plan. In our last post about this theme, we declared that having a complete business continuity plan will involve a disaster recovery plan as part of it. The disaster recovery plan is a portion of the business continuity plan yet it can also be regarded as an individual file.
The disaster recovery plan is thoroughly detailed, including what would cause implementation, how emergency notifications will be given, processes to start the emergency response force, and the areas where personnel should meet. All of this is created with an organized system of responses.
Objective 5: Identify the Location of Critical Data and Assets
The goal of an IT business continuity strategy is to discover the location of vital data and resources. This facilitates the initiation of retrieval efforts even in the absence of important IT personnel. Visualize a situation in which you do not have any IT personnel. It is necessary for there to be some kind of precedent that other people or interested parties can take as an example. Any confusion will significantly impede the recovery process.
An IT asset management system provides an opportunity for businesses to automate the process of keeping track of possessions and decrease mistakes that arise from outdated data, duplicate entries, incorrect serial numbers, and overlapping tags. Asset management systems are involved in cyber security prevention steps. Without an up-to-date list of assets, it is possible for a machine to connect to a network that isn’t protected against viruses or updated to handle any security threats that have been identified.
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