Business Continuity
There is a great deal of talk about business continuity whether it be from the insurers of the business or from other members of the business community. The ethos behind business continuity is about working out how to stay in business in the event of a disaster. Incidents such as building fires, flooding, equipment failure etc all of these events should be planned for and the risks mitigated by putting in place documentation and processes which will ensure that such events do not permanently damage the business. Many small businesses owners do not look at business continuity as it appears to be the reserve of much larger companies and does not apply to them, wrong. The fact is that for your business was to suffer a complete disaster then how would you recover from this and indeed could you currently recover from this situation? Chances are the answer is no. Is this something that you can afford? Yes
The fact is that you cannot afford not to put this in plan. So what does the plan consist of; well it should contain the contact names and numbers of all individuals involved in the recovery
process (i.e. Telephone company, IT vendor, software suppliers etc). It also needs to contain all relevant passwords relating to your computer systems, details relating to the setup of the network and software. It should detail the recovery process for data relating to the network this should include how the backups are performed and what software is required to perform the recovery. The plan needs to contain absolutely everything that is required to run the business and with the recent floods and other adverse weather conditions it has never been more important to plan for the worst. So take some time and think about how your business will be affected should the worst happen and start and plan how you will recover from such and event before it happens.