Calculating Business Risks

Posted on: 24 November 2021

An actionable disaster plan that allows your company to function during and after a disaster is essential. You might not be able to function fully, but you can keep the business going and reduce your chances of losing data if you create a blueprint for what to do when a regional or national disaster strikes. The sudden shutdowns in March 2020, fires in the West, hurricanes in the Southeast—all of these and more made continuity in business difficult for many. Preparing ahead of time lets you get through these difficult times.

Who Can Do Whose Job?

Mission-critical duties in the hands of one person is itself a disaster waiting to happen. If that person is unable to work during or just after the disaster, then the business can't function. You need redundancy in terms of who can do what. This doesn't mean having two employees for every position in the company, of course, but of the mission-critical functions, who can function as the emergency backup person?

What Are the Absolutely Critical Functions That Can't Wait?

There are critical functions, and then there are absolutely critical functions. If your business has been hit by a disaster, or even if just one location has been hit, you can't place too much on the shoulders of those who may have just had to evacuate their families to a shelter three counties away. Yes, accessing databases and such from anywhere is much easier now that more people have smartphones, but do keep people's emotional bandwidth in mind. Narrow down what has to be done to keep the business running in a disaster to the absolute minimum. And then narrow that list down again to be absolutely sure it's the minimum.

What if the Storage and Backup Centers Are Hit?

Disasters aren't necessarily local, nor do they wait their turn. If you work in a region prone to wildfires, for example, you could find your employees in one location evacuated due to one fire, and the employees in another location evacuated due to a second fire. And that's assuming those are the only disasters you could face; if you have a location in Houston, for example, a stalled hurricane or tropical storm could force those employees out at the same time.

This also means that your data storage and backup storage centers could be hit, too. You can't predict where a disaster will hit, but having multiple backup sites may be a good idea, or at least having a RAID-array-style physical backup in one place and a remote backup somewhere else. The business continuity software you use should make it easy to complete frequent backups.

For more information, reach out to a company that provides business continuity software.