Imagine your office has a sudden server outage and your clients no longer have access to your services. Would you know what to do? Business continuity is vital for any business or organization who provides services to clients in the event this service is disrupted in any way. You need to be able to quickly and efficiently mitigate the issue at hand, reboot your systems, and ensure your clients are properly notified. In order to do this, processes must be documented and practiced to reduce the amount of latency between the incident and restoration. This is why business continuity planning is important.
An organization's business continuity plan should contain all processes and procedures necessary to deal with any kind of service disruption — whether that be a server malfunction, office closure, evacuation, or a more serious incident. The more prepared an organization is before an incident occurs, the more efficient it will be with the resolution.
When creating a business continuity plan, an organization should attempt to identify all key players in the mitigation efforts and specify their roles and responsibilities. Knowing who is in charge of what steps in the process will save employees from frantically asking around for the person with the right skill set to deal with the issue. Confusion creates panic, and panic induces unneeded risks.
Some questions you may want to answer when identifying roles and responsibilities include:
- If x happens, who is the most qualified team member to deal with it?
- If this person is unavailable, who else can perform this role?
- What skill sets are required for a team member in role x?
- Do we have an updated list of team members' qualifications?
When a service disruption occurs, the organization must set their communication processes in motion to notify clients, employees, and other stakeholders in a timely manner, as required by the scope of the incident. Proper communication can sometimes be the difference between life and death, which is why business continuity planning is important. Communication processes are an integral part of any continuity plan and should be developed and included well in advance of any incident.
Most of the time, service disruptions come out of the blue. Planning is essential when it comes to being sufficiently prepared to deal with any situation that occurs, no matter the degree of urgency. The ability to maintain business continuity throughout an incident and reduce the amount of potential downtime goes a long way to gaining client trust and loyalty because they know that you are committed to providing them with top-level service.
SimplyCast understands why business continuity planning is important, which is why we provide software that can help organizations with the creation and implementation of these plans. With templating functionality as well as automation capabilities, organizations can more easily create, maintain, and launch business continuity processes whenever they are needed — sometimes with only the push of a button.
If you are interested in seeing how SimplyCast can help your organization build and execute your organization's business continuity plans, visit our business continuity industry page, our incident management product page, or simply contact us today!
