Make 2022 the year of your business continuity plan
Updating your business continuity plan regularly is an essential cost of doing business in a changing world of work. Although having a concrete plan is a good start, if it’s not relevant and regularly updated, it will probably result in undesirable outcomes or even worse.
When disaster strikes, entire workforces can become crippled. Fortunately planning ahead, and taking the appropriate measures, can help businesses become more resilient. Investing time in business continuity planning can help businesses save money, prevent reputational harm and recover faster than their unprepared competitors.
As we enter our third year of the global pandemic, the positive momentum business continuity planning has gained is encouraging because it illustrates a greater understanding of how critical that planning is for survival. But it doesn’t mean that businesses can rest easy. As they grow, it’s essential for any business to keep a keen eye on the horizon and to continue to prepare for future threats.
A new day, a new threat
Over the past year alone we’ve seen several new cyber threats that have the potential to upend businesses. The prevailing work-from-home trend has shifted from being about crisis management to being the new default for most businesses. With that shift comes a host of unprecedented opportunities for disaster.
This is why it’s essential that business owners assess the current state of their operations in order to put together a business continuity plan that’s both comprehensive and reflective of the world right now, and the threats they may have.
Download our free ebook, ‘Cybersecurity: Smart threats need a smarter defence’, which helps you understand these threats and how to better safeguard against them.
How to get started on an updated business continuity plan that can benefit your business
Whether it’s a minor change to your existing plan or a full-scale revamp of your cybersecurity measures, any updates that you make to your business continuity plan will ensure that it’s relevant to changing conditions. This will allow you to speed up your time to recovery, which can help your business especially in times of disaster.
After thoroughly reviewing the efficacy of your current plan, you’ll want to look at both macro and micro events from the past year. Consider world events that could impact your company or industry, as well as risks specific to your business. The following are examples of questions you can ask yourself:
- Are there any points that are no longer relevant?
- Is our plan clear enough, or too vague?
- Have we added any new vendors or partners over the course of the year which can impact our plan?
- Did we make any significant changes to our internal policies?
- Have we acquired any new technology that affects day-to-day operations?
- Are our company goals and priorities the same?
When should you update your business continuity plan?
How often you update your plan depends on several factors including your industry, business purpose, your operations, and your risk profile. As a baseline, it’s good practice to review plans for critical operations every six months.
In addition to completing these regularly scheduled reviews, you’ll need to update your business continuity plan in case of the following events:
- If there have been significant changes to the way you operate as a result of structural changes, new partners, new technology or changing policies.
- If real-world events reveal gaps in your continuity management.
- If you’ve tried to implement your plan and found it to be ineffective.
- If your business is leveraging the power of the cloud, especially for a remote workforce, as a means of ensuring data security through a premium SSL-encrypted Online Backup service.
Start your new year prepared
You can take action today and prepare your business for the unknown. By updating your business continuity plan in a way that reflects the current landscape, you can prepare for whatever the future might bring. Whether that’s technically reconsidering how you operate, adjusting processes to suit your workforce or by better using the cloud for safe, secure Online Backup.
