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3 Steps to a Business Continuity Plan

As your business grows, your reliance on technology and the information systems that support your business increase. From e-mail to financials, the hardware and software applications that your organization uses everyday to conduct business need to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Without them, your business may not survive.

If your organization has no DR plan at this time, you as the business owner need to make this a high priority within the company. Here are a few steps to begin the process:

1.    Assemble your executive team to assess the minimal amount of information and technology needed to run the business. This may take a few days to analyze the current dependencies and impacts if your systems were down for any period of time.

2.    Determine the impact to your business if any of your critical systems were unavailable. The systems that are critical to your business might include; communications, financials and manufacturing applications.

3.    Once the impact analysis has been completed, develop a risk analysis and recovery plan if any or all of your critical systems were affected by a disaster. A recovery plan, may include moving your operations to another site within the company or a Disaster recovery site external to your operations that specialize in business continuity operations.

In summary, the best insurance against a calamity is extensive preparation and execution when needed. If your business could not operate if one or more of your systems were unavailable, it is time to plan for the worse and hope that it never happens. Without a business continuity plan, your company could be devastated beyond repair.


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