Business Continuity Planning for Small Business: Make Today the Day.

The pandemic of 2020 took the world by surprise, with certain groups, including small business owners, bearing the brunt of the deadly outbreak. Arguably, one of the more positive outcomes from the tragic event is business leaders’ renewed focus on disaster preparedness, in particular, ensuring business continuity and data recovery in the face of sudden, unplanned disruptions.

Unfortunately, a global health menace like COVID-19 represents just one hazard to a company’s operations and stability. Statistically, there are many far more common causes of potential downtime and data loss, all of which have a place in your business-continuity discussions, if not in the plan itself:

• Natural disasters, often seasonal forces of nature that pose a significant threat to property, human safety or critical infrastructure, such hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms, flooding, wildfires and earthquakes.
• Utility failures, which include electricity or power failure, loss of internet/telecommunication lines or loss of water service. A 2019 study by LogicMonitor revealed that 96 percent of organizations experienced at least one power outage in the past three years, and at least one electrical brownout.
• Man-made disasters, like chemical explosions, gas leaks, oil spills and factory fire, that result from human negligence, mistake or accident.
• Malicious insiders, disgruntled current and former employees with active network access and an axe to grind with the company or its leaders.
• User error, such as falling for cyberattacks, phishing and other social engineering schemes, practicing poor password hygiene, and the mishandling and/or errant sending of sensitive data.

Knowing and planning for these varied continuity threats matters to leaders because the potential losses represent ‘real money.’

“Just one hour of downtime costs $8,000 for a small company and $74,000 for a medium-sized firm,” according to Datto, an enterprise-grade technology provider. The per-hour cost jumps to $700,000 for a large enterprise, which equates to about $11,600 per minute. 

Planning as Prevention

No matter the cause of an unplanned business interruption, one of the most effective methods of bouncing back is preparing and following a well-conceived, oft-reviewed business continuity plan.

In a nutshell, this vital document formalizes your company’s IT policies, procedures and precautions to minimize downtime in the event of an unforeseen calamity.

Tailored Planning is Ideal

Since no two companies’ needs or situation are exactly alike, continuity planning requires a customized approach. An IT Managed Services Provider (IT MSP) like TeamLogic IT, can help you assesses your business infrastructure, operations and environment, and use that data to develop and deploy a business continuity plan that’s uniquely tailored to your company, covering vital areas such as:

• The most likely current and future threats to your systems’ uptime and operations
• The process, technologies and tools needed to keep critical systems running
• Data backup and recovery procedures, including resources needed to restore information and operations quickly after failure
• Steps and processes to assure that IT equipment remains operational and usable, while minimizing human and local factors that might impact continuity

Ready to rethink or refresh your business continuity plan? Contact TeamLogic IT Plano today at 469.573.3743.  Or grab our free Business Continuity download. The security-and-threat intelligence company, Webroot, also offers some great tips to increase your firm’s cyber-resilience.