In today’s fast-paced business landscape, the saying “time is of the essence” has never been more pertinent – especially when it comes to time, and revenue, lost due to disruptions caused by unforeseen events.
With IT at the heart of most modern businesses to some extent or another, down-time in your technology can significantly impact your operations and your bottom line, so it’s crucial to mitigate the risk by prioritising proactive business continuity and disaster recovery planning.
To best achieve this in partnership with your MSSP provider, it’s important to educate yourself (and your people) in how you can create the right strategy and processes. A good place to start is by asking yourself and your team some questions:
1. What is business continuity and disaster recovery?
Business continuity refers to an organisation’s ability to maintain essential functions during and after a disruptive incident, and disaster recovery focuses on the strategies and processes employed to restore normal operations after the disruption.
2. What’s the risk to my business?
Just as businesses assess other risks, the best thing to do is complete a business continuity and disaster recovery risk assessment. This will help to identify potential threats and highlight vulnerabilities so that you can start to build a robust framework that might incorporate preparation for things like natural disasters, cyberattacks or human error.
3. How do I stay up to date?
As with any part of business planning, it’s vital to review, update and test your plans frequently so that they’re ready to swing into action should the worst happen. It’s no use spending lots of time and effort on a plan that only ticks today’s boxes – if you don’t update it frequently, there’s a high chance it will quickly be rendered useless because the business has evolved since the plan was created.
4. How do I keep my team up to speed?
In a word, training. The response of any business to issues of continuity and disaster recovery relies heavily on the knowledge and preparedness of employees, so it’s essential that your people are skilled and empowered by having at their fingertips knowledge of protocol and best practice in minimising disruption and accelerating the recovery process.
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