Business Continuity for Uninterrupted Business Processes
In today’ hyper competitive business environment, the success of any business enterprise depends on its ability to ensure business continuity even in adverse circumstances. Business continuity refers to the methodology that organizations must implement to ensure that its critical business functions are available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities on any given time.
Business disruptions are unpredictable as it can happen at any time in any form. Disruptions can happen to systems, utilities, or infrastructure. Business disruptions are of two types- natural and manmade. Natural disasters include floods, fires, volcanoes, hurricanes or storms, earthquakes, pandemics and power outages. While manmade disruptions are terrorism, sabotage, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) failure, cyber attack, theft, insider or external threats and so on. Besides these catastrophic business disruptions, there occur several mundane disruptions such as bad traffic, seasonal snowstorms, rains, and even employees taking the occasional unplanned Paid Time Off (PTO). The unplanned PTOs affect business continuity adversely since organizations do not get adequate time to backfill their role. As a result, tasks may go neglected for an entire day thereby delaying critical business processes.
If business continuity is the processes and procedures or methodology that an organization implements in order to ensure that essential functions continue during and after a disaster, business continuity planning refers to the process of deciding what that methodology should be. According to Gartner, the business continuity plan must include:
* Disaster Recovery Plan
It identifies the strategies that organizations plan for post failure procedures.
* Business Resumption Plan
It details the different methods of maintaining essential services at the location.
* Business Recovery Plan
It refers to the different methods of recovering business functions at another location.
* Contingency Plan
It specifies the different means of dealing with those events that cause serious impact on the organization.
Business continuity plans help organizations to:
* reduce income loss and chances of closure
* enhance public image and reputation by instilling confidence and trust in the organization’ ability to deliver products or services even in adverse circumstances
* improve efficiency of the organization
* protect their critical data, hardware, software, etc
* be better prepared in handling disasters and in preventing its devastating impacts
Today most companies have a mobile workforce made possible by the discovery of new technological innovations such as SSL VPNs, load balancers, Remote Desktop Protocol and so on. Though these technologies provide employees with the freedom to work anywhere at any time, it cannot guarantee productivity unless and until organizations put in place effective business continuity solutions.
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