Business continuity plans are essential for ensuring your organization is prepared to weather uncertainty. When business disruptions occur, having a well-developed plan in place can make all the difference. Your plan should prepare for everything from making operational changes and implementing new processes to employee and customer communications. We’ve outlined reasons business continuity planning is important and how it can help you prepare for uncertain times.
Building a Continuity Plan
A well-designed business continuity plan allows organizations to adapt when disruptions arise. However, planning for an unforeseen event at an unknown time can be challenging. The key for most teams is planning to maximize flexibility and adaptability.
Your team should analyze their operations, security, and communications to identify weaknesses. Creating redundancies can enable your organization to become more resilient to disruption.
Additionally, the most effective continuity plans are continuously evaluated and updated. For example, if your continuity plan involves working from home, don’t wait until it is necessary to begin allowing remote work. Instead, create a policy that is used on a smaller scale during normal operations.
Who Should Be Involved
A business continuity plan should involve input from key executives and managers from all major departments. While business operations are often the major focus of continuity plans, other teams such as security, sales, marketing, finance, and human resources also need to be involved. The goal of your plan is to ensure continued operations with minimal to no disruptions in service. Therefore, every aspect of your business should be considered.
You should also consider involving vendors and service providers. They can help to ensure the continuity of resources that are not directly controlled by your organization.
Communicating the Plan With Stakeholders
It is important to communicate your plan to stakeholders including employees and customers. Often, it is beneficial to begin communication before the plan needs to be implemented, especially with team members. Those involved in implementing the plan should be familiar with the goals, new processes, and their roles in advance.
Why Continuity Planning Matters
If there is anything that your organization can be sure of, it is that you will experience disruptions. Facilities get damaged, natural disasters require evacuation, viruses cause lockdowns, and many other unforeseen circumstances can arise.
Planning for every possible disruption is nearly impossible. However, a robust continuity plan can enable your organization to be sufficiently flexible so that it can adapt to shifting scenarios.
Creating a continuity plan can also enable management teams to identify the weaknesses in their current operations. Focusing on asking “what if” provides a unique chance to strengthen operations, safety, and more.
Security Challenges in Business Continuity
In many continuity plans, security takes a back seat to expedience and operational needs. Organizations have many excuses about why they “can’t” continue to take sufficient measures to protect their organizations during a business disruption. However, this is short sighted and should actually be considered a top priority If there are disruptions in your business, this provides prime opportunity for security breaches.
Digital and physical threats are no less significant when a business is applying its continuity plan. You and your customers should be aware of these special considerations in such circumstances:
• Vacant facilities: If a building needs to be vacated, it can present new challenges. Having effective remote alarm monitoring can assist with the continued protection of those facilities.
• Increased crime rate: Frequently, business interruptions intersect with broader social and economic disruptions. These periods can come with increased crime rates. Continuity plans should address this accordingly.
• Remote work: Many continuity plans include some amount of working from home. Ensuring information security when resources are not centrally located can be challenging. It can be helpful to develop and implement a remote work plan before the continuity plan is activated.
Adding Reliable Alarm Monitoring to Your Business Continuity Plan
Taking on the challenge of keeping your business and your customers’ businesses secure during disruptions is easier with modular and scalable security software. Security Information Systems Alarm Center solution provides powerful alarm monitoring tools that can be invaluable for robust, remote control. Call 407–345–1550 to request a free demo and learn more.
