Forbes writes that the average cost of downtime for large organizations is $9,000 per minute. That can quickly add up to the point where it devastates a business. In a recent Arcserve independent study, only 31 percent of our survey respondents are confident they can recover lost data in 24 hours. Multiply that by $9000! The consequences of failing to comply with regulatory requirements like GDPR, CCPA, and the Data Privacy Act can exponentially increase those costs. That's why a business continuity plan could be crucial to your business's survival.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan defines your strategies, procedures, and processes to ensure your organization can continue operating during and after a disaster or disruption. It includes plans for maintaining essential functions and restoring data to minimize downtime and protect critical business assets. A business continuity plan ensures your organization’s data resilience and long-term viability when facing unforeseen threats.
This five-step plan for creating, testing, and maintaining a business continuity plan will help your organization get the business back up and running quickly after an incident, from system failures to ransomware and cyberattacks to natural disasters.
1. Get Management Buy-In
Your business continuity plan won’t succeed without support from the top. Executives and senior management are decision-makers regarding the funding required to kick-start and support any business continuity initiative.
Getting buy-in from the start of business continuity plan development is crucial because these individuals will help identify the organization's most valuable data and assets and set business continuity and data recovery priorities. Without their input, your continuity plan is unlikely to succeed. Executive buy-in and support will also help facilitate cross-departmental collaboration on the plan, which might be challenging to achieve independently.
3. Create a Business Continuity Response Team
A business continuity team ensures your organization can continue to operate during and after a disruption. The team is responsible for executing your business continuity plan, coordinating recovery efforts, and minimizing downtime to maintain critical business functions.
With a dedicated team, you can quickly and efficiently respond to incidents and reduce impacts on operations, customer service, and overall business performance. Your business continuity team should include representatives from various departments, including:
- IT
- Operations
- Human resources
- Legal
- Communications
The IT team is the core group responsible for managing your technology infrastructure and data recovery, while operations team members ensure that business processes run smoothly. Communications personnel should manage internal and external messaging and information sharing to keep stakeholders informed throughout the recovery process. The team should also include senior management to oversee decision-making and allocate necessary resources.
4. Perform a Business Impact Analysis
A business impact analysis (BIA) helps leadership and the business continuity team determine the potential consequences of a cyberattack, data breach, or other data disasters. It identifies critical business functions, assesses the risks posed by potential threats, and estimates the costs—in both dollars and damage to your organization's reputation—of such events. Your BIA plays a vital role in guiding your organization's incident response and business continuity planning and strategies.
A comprehensive BIA should include:
- Inventory of all critical assets, such as data, applications, and IT infrastructure
- Assessment of how threats could impact these components
- Evaluate potential downtime, data loss, and regulatory implications that could arise from an incident
Your BIA supports the development of a prioritized response plan that ensures you allocate resources efficiently, safeguard your most valuable assets, and maintain business continuity in the face of threats.
5. Develop a Comprehensive Business Continuity Plan
After conducting your BIA, the next step is identifying and prioritizing critical business functions that must be maintained during and after a disruption. This requires understanding which systems, applications, and processes are essential for daily operations, determining acceptable downtime for each, and helping you establish recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO) for each critical system.
Next, it is essential to assess the resources needed to maintain these functions during a disruption. This includes personnel involved, technologies, physical infrastructure, and third parties such as external partners. You must establish clear communication protocols to keep employees, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders informed throughout the recovery process. This is also vital for ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and CCPA.
Detailed response and recovery procedures that identify how you will respond to specific types of incidents—a cyberattack or natural disaster, for example—are also crucial. These procedures should outline the roles and responsibilities of the business continuity team so that each knows what to do in the event of a disruption. The plan should include step-by-step instructions for restoring critical systems, securing data, and maintaining operations and guidelines for coordinating with third-party service providers, if necessary. This involves restoring IT systems and ensuring compromised data is recovered and secured.
Finally, your business continuity plan must be tested regularly, updated, and refined to ensure it works as expected when needed. This includes running tabletop exercises, such as those outlined on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) website, and full-scale simulations to ensure all team members know their roles and recovery processes work as intended.
These tests also help you identify any gaps or weaknesses in the plan so you can make necessary adjustments. Regular plan reviews are essential as business environments, technologies, and potential risks evolve. By continuously refining your strategy, your organization can ensure you are well-prepared to respond effectively to any disruption and maintain business continuity.
Choose Unified Data Protection
Supporting your business continuity plan requires investing in effective—and cost-effective—technologies that ensure your data is safeguarded and can be recovered no matter what happens. That's where Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) software is a game-changer. It delivers an all-in-one data protection solution that helps you comprehensively retain, back up, and restore your data. And it protects your company’s business systems and data from attacks or loss, delivering increased data resilience enabled by simplified processes across all storage platforms, whether local, virtual, or cloud.
Want to learn more about Arcserve UDP? Request a demo.
