Strategies and importance of business continuity in today’s organizations

Abstract

Many businesses are leveraging technology in all the areas of their business as it helps them realize the true value and quick return on investments. As the technology is having application in the business, there is also increasing threats to the information systems of an organization arising from disasters. Disaster can strike at any time without warning, and they can take the shape of the storm, flood, hurricanes, civil unrest, product contamination or terrorist bombs among others. Business continuity requires that organizations protect against, reduce the likelihood and make sure that their organizations can recover from disruptive events. A business continuity plan ensures that organizations have a good preparation, and they anticipate and respond to security threats to their information and systems appropriately. The paper outlines the strategies and the importance of having a business continuity plan in an organization.

Introduction

Business continuity refers to maintaining the business processes or having a quick resumption in the event of a disruption to such as a flood, fire outbreak, data deletion of malicious attack. A business continuity plan entails the procedures and the instructions that a company needs to follow in the event of disaster outbreak. The recovery incorporates all the business processes, assets, people, business partners and many more. Every disaster is unique, and it manifests in unexpected ways, so that is the reason organizations has to prepare ahead of time to address any disaster. By so doing they can continue their operations amidst major disruption because they will have a concrete plan on how to go about in mitigating those incidents of having a quick recovery. BC planning aims to prevent the interruption of mission-critical services and ensure there is fully functioning as quickly as possible.

Business continuity strategies

It is a requirement that there be the conduction g of business impact analysis after which the development of strategies takes place in light of how to operate a business after a disruption. There are several strategies a business needs to consider in business continuity. One of the strategies is to ensure there is the training of the response team as well as all the staff so as to be conversant with the contents of the business continuity plan. The training also equips them with the required skills on how to report any security incidents and how to respond to those incidents as appropriately as possible. That is because business continuity and disaster response are the responsibility of every individual in an organization (Kim, 2010). Another strategy that business has to consider in business continuity is to hire the needed equipment for addressing disasters in good time so as to avoid confusions during the event of a disaster.

There is also the strategy of having a data backup in place so that when the loss or damage of data takes place then an organization can recover the lost data effectively from the backup site. Backups can protect the business from worst scenarios like natural disasters, malware attackers or other critical failures (Watters, 2014). Those backups need to have storage on site so as to be secure and if possible, an organization can contract its backup to a third party such cloud computing providers. Data backup is the heart of business continuity and without it an organization can lose vital data and systems that can be too costly to recover culminating to the death of the business (Myers, 2006). Another vital strategy to ensure business continuity is to have insurance policies and other vital contents kept off site. Businesses also should develop a continuity strategy for each product or service so that they can restore their business before they reach a maximum acceptable outage.

Importance of business continuity

Business continuity is integral to overall risks management of an organization (Snedaker & Rima, 2014). It is impossible to eliminate all types of risks, and that is why companies implement business continuity so as to prepare for potentially disruptive events. A business continuity plan is vital because it provides the strategies regarding how a company will continue after the disruption of its functions by the disaster. Then BC plan stipulates how an enterprise will prepare for a disaster, how it will respond and the steps required to ensure the restoration of normal operations (Thejendra, 2014). It suggests a more comprehensive strategy that ensures that business remains operational, not only after a catastrophe but also during small disruptions. It helps to limit the long-term or long-term negative impacts on the organization. A solid business continuity plan enables a company to address any situation forthwith and effectively (Snedaker & Rima, 2014). Every company has critical systems that it relies on to function and so it should ensure there is maximum protection for those systems. The absence of business continuity in the organization can cost its life because there are organizations closed in the event of a disaster because they lacked business continuity at hand.

Conclusion

Regardless of the type of industry, when an unforeseen event takes place resulting in the halt of the day-to-day functions, a firm needs to recover as quickly as possible so that it continues to provide services. It is mandatory that every organization have a business continuity plan, and this will help them to manage risks and potential security incidents that threaten their normal operations. The lack of a business continuity plan in an enterprise puts the enterprise at risk of high financial losses, loss of reputation and a risk of losing its customers. So it is good to have a business continuity plan in place because the risk of having no such as plan can pose a serious risk to a company.

References

Kim, T. (2010). Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, DRBC 2010., & Future Generation Information Technology Conference, FGIT. (2010).

Myers, K. N. (2006). Business Continuity Strategies: Protecting Against Unplanned Disasters (3rd Ed.). Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Snedaker, S., & Rima, C. (2014). Business continuity and disaster recovery planning for IT professionals. Waltham, MA: Syngress.

Thejendra, B. S. (2014). Disaster recovery and business continuity: A quick guide for organisations and business managers. Ely, Cambridgeshire, U.K: IT Governance Pub.

Watters, J. (2014). Disaster recovery, crisis response, and business continuity: A management desk reference. New York, N.Y.: Apress.

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