Preparing for Disaster
By Steve Beard
www.21biz.com
What do you do – when despite all your best
efforts – something catastrophic happens to you or your business?
How many minutes, hours or days could your
business be shut down before you feel a financial pinch?
If you and your employees had to run out of
your offices right now – never to return – do you have a plan to get
your business up and running without loss of service to your
customers or cash flow to you?
Asking and answering tough questions like these
is part of the process of developing a business recovery plan.
Planning helps you identify critical business assets and prioritize
the steps to repair or replace them if a disaster strikes.
Business Recovery Planning helps you prepare for that “unknown”
disaster that may be just around the corner for your business.
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes
and as you can readily imagine – an event that’s a minor annoyance
to one company might well be the death of another.
- A computer hard drive fails with no backup
and a corporate salesman loses a key proposal or a small business
bookkeeper loses this year’s numbers. A computer virus forces the
shutdown of a server leaving employees and customers waiting hours
for it to be repaired.
- A protracted illness leaves a consultant or
small business owner without the resources to continue, while at a
larger business a fellow employee fills in while the individual is
out on sick leave.
- Your building is hit by lightening taking
out your server and phone system or worst yet – everything burns.
To fires we can add floods, gas leaks, toxic spills, earthquakes,
equipment theft, and hurricanes as potential major disasters.
- Your ISP gets hacked. The
server has to be rebuilt and its discovered that the
last backup was 30 days ago. You lose your mailing
list or perhaps your web site.
In today’s wired world
you have to remember
that the disaster doesn’t have to hit you directly to impact your
business. In addition to macro disasters that impact all of us, a
physical or financial disaster at a key supplier of products or
services can be just as devastating as a direct hit on your
business.
Lessons From Sept. 11
The horrible events of Sept. 11 showed both the
vulnerabilities and the strengths of American Business.
- Larger businesses faired much better than
smaller ones primarily because they had multiple locations and
often had a business recovery plan in place. In many cases,
larger
companies also maintained remote, co-location facilities to backup
or mirror key real time data.
- Small and medium size businesses struggled
to recover because of lack of data backup, loss of facilities and
equipment, and key personnel. Very few of these companies had
any type of recovery plan and some have simply disappeared from
business.
- Cell phones, email, and the Internet showed
that they were real substitutes for more traditional forms of
communications.
The terrorist attacks have impacted all of us.
How can we learn from this and build our businesses stronger and
more resistant to future events?
Questions Are The Answer! Business
Recovery Planning starts with the assumption that something bad has
happened to you or your business. It helps you to answer theses
questions: What Do We Do If______ happens to us? What Do We Do If
We Cause _____ to happen to Someone Else?
Asking the right questions is the key to
developing a workable plan and will often uncover operational
vulnerabilities within your business that can be fixed immediately.
Here’s a four-step process to get you focused on the right
questions.
Step 1. Deal with people issues first.
Begin by identifying who should be part of your Business Recovery
Team. Involve employees from all levels of your business and don’t
assume that you or your key people will be available to manage when
a disaster strikes.
Next, identify those who have a vested interest
in what happens to your company. The list may include family,
employees, customers, suppliers, insurance providers, legal counsel,
stockholders, and media. They will want to know what’s happened and
how you’re going to fix it. A quick response will engender support
and good will from all sides.
Step 2. Customers and cash flow are the
lifeblood of every business. Focus your next questions on how
customers contact or interface with your company. What personnel,
facilities, data, or infrastructure must you have in place to keep
your customers buying? Obviously, if this part of your operation is
damaged or missing – you’re out of business. Develop a plan to
repair or replace these mission critical resources so that business
downtime is minimized.
Step 3. Once the sale is made - if you
can’t deliver on a customer request for product or services you’re
still out of business. For many businesses this requires a whole
different set of facilities, personnel, or infrastructure and may
involve suppliers. What do you need to deliver your product or
service in a timely manner? If you can’t deliver – what’s your
backup position? Again, you need a plan.
Step 4. Computer equipment and
technology are the backbone of most businesses connecting operations
and centralizing data. In addition to physical threats, databases,
accounting, email, servers, software and applications are all
subject to a multitude of other threats that can shut down or
cripple a business. These include power problems, viruses, hackers,
employee misuse, etc. If you lost some or all of your IT
capability, what’s your plan to get it running again quickly?
Step 5. Now about
that data - whatever it may be - if you haven't been backing it up
all along then steps 1-4 really don't mean much because you're out
of business. Go do sometime about data backup right now.
A Business Recovery Plan is a key planning tool
for businesses of all sizes but especially for small businesses that
have the least resources to survive a disaster. Remember to keep
your plan current and always keep copies of your plan off-site.
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