Best Business Continuity Practices to Know

CIO Applications| Tuesday, February 04, 2020

Considering best practices while planning and implementing a business continuity strategy will be vital for firms to manage events of unplanned outages.

FREMONT, CA: The frequency and severity of emergency situations seem to be increasing, and reliance on technology is expanding. This leaves enterprises susceptible to a variety of emerging risks. Managing these risks by developing a business continuity plan has become the key to the survival of any organization. An organization's business continuity plan should have the necessary processes and procedures to deal with any service disruption, according to SimplyCast. The well-prepared firm is more efficient in managing business disruption. Given that, here is an outline for the best business continuity plan.

• Prioritizing Business Continuity Functions

Depending upon the organization's size, IT complexity, and industry, implementing a business continuity solution is more than a trivial expense. So, it is important for organizations to do an in-depth analysis of their core business activities to prioritize which services need to be available immediately. Restoring customer-facing applications should always be the top priority. Also, applications like order entry, compliance activities cannot afford to miss a beat.

• Automating Business Continuity Processes

Most organizations today still rely upon manual, human-centric processes to recover from outages and restore access to data and applications. In other words, their business continuity strategy relies upon individuals getting to remote facilities to begin the failover and recovery measures. But, automating such failover and recovery processes will help organizations avoid situations like unavailability of transportation, being stranded with power outages, and many more. Automated recovery and restoration will help businesses in performing timely disaster management.

• Considering Business Continuity to be a Managed Service

Software, infrastructure, security, platforms, customer support — all of these managed services are important elements of an organization. Leaders choose managed service providers that have proven experience and expertise in each area. The same should be practiced when picking a partner for business continuity and disaster recovery. Firms can immediately recover from a service interruption with the help of a partner offering remote backup storage and one that has hardened infrastructure, and disaster tools for recovery.