Mastering Business Continuity: 4 Essential Steps

By Gennifer Biggs, Exigent Technologies
The statistics are clear: When a major disruption impacts an organization, 40% of small businesses never reopen, and an additional 25% that manage to reopen end up failing within the year. That means safeguarding your company against disruptions is not merely a matter of choice; it's a strategic imperative. While backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions are vital components, they represent only a segment of the broader framework known as business continuity planning (BCP). 

To navigate the complexities of protecting your organization against cyber attacks, natural disasters, and operational hiccups, understanding the four key steps to business continuity is paramount.

1. Differentiating Backup/Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity The first step towards mastering business continuity is understanding the distinction between backup and disaster recovery (BDR). While BDR focuses on the technical aspects of data recovery and system restoration, business continuity encompasses a holistic strategy for recovering critical business functions post-disaster. It delves into broader considerations such as employee relocation, stakeholder communications, and prioritization of business functions. Recognizing this disparity is crucial for crafting comprehensive preparedness plans.

2. Prevention: Building the Foundation Prevention serves as the initial pillar of business continuity planning. It involves implementing foundational measures such as risk identification, cybersecurity assessments, and redundancy establishment. Conducting a thorough risk assessment tailored to the organization's specific operational threats lays the groundwork for informed decision-making. Collaboration with managed IT services providers (MSPs) becomes indispensable in deploying robust data security measures and integrating redundancy into critical systems and infrastructure. That partnership can impact planning by providing not just additional knowledge, but manpower, a secondary physical location, and best practices shared from real-life experience.

3. Preparedness: Planning for Diverse Disruptions Preparedness is an often overlooked but critical aspect of business continuity. Crafting an effective plan entails preparing for various types of disruptions and understanding each scenario’s potential impact on operations, data, employees, and assets. This step emphasizes the importance of research, data analysis, and proactive measures to inform planning. Developing detailed procedural guides such as incident response plans, communications plans, and crisis management teams ensures readiness to navigate emergencies effectively. Download an incident response plan template

4. Response to Recovery: Navigating Disasters The final stages of business continuity involve responding to disasters and executing recovery efforts. Rooted in the preparation step, this crucial element depends on data restoration best practices and system recovery procedures for the swift recovery of critical data and infrastructure. Regular testing and collaboration with your MSP partner are imperative to identify and address weaknesses in the plan and recovery procedures.  Download our disaster recovery planning checklist

Mastering business continuity is not merely about recovery; it's about fostering resilience in the face of unexpected disruptions – of all types and sizes. By following these four steps –prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery – organizations can fortify themselves against operational disruptions. With so many opportunities for Mother Nature and bad actors to derail your business, comprehensive business continuity planning is imperative for long-term success and sustainability. For a complete guide to business continuity, download our ebook here