Business Continuity in the Wake of Disaster

In the wake of a disastrous event, your first thought is not with your business. But after making sure that your family and property is safe, it is time to implement your business continuity plan.

Business continuity is the exercise by which you strategically plan for your business to continue operations should an event occur to threaten those operations. In the Sarasota and Bradenton area, we may have plans in place for power or phone outages, flooding, and inaccessibility to our building.

There are many factors to consider for every business, based upon their daily operations and the challenges they face. But one thing is certain across all business models – the road to successful business continuity in the wake of a disaster is paved before the event ever occurs.

How To Plan for Business Continuity

If it hasn’t already, your company should embark on an extensive analysis of your business structure, and where your vulnerabilities lie. By truly analyzing how your business operates day-to-day, you can begin to set a strategy in place for how to operate after a catastrophic event. Here are just a few areas where you may consider planning for the continuation of your company.

• • Touch Base & Check In: After an event, employees should know how to check-in for multiple reasons. First, you want to make sure everyone is safe. But you also want to have a way to communicate with your employees about if your business is open, if they are expected to come to work, or if only supervisors need to report to work. Cell phones and social media have made this step infinitely easier; still, everyone needs to understand the plan. Blast texting is likely the easiest way to communicate with your employees; they should also have a number that they can contact to let you know that they are safe, or what their situation is.
  • Establish a Chain of Command: In an emergency situation, it may not be prudent to require employees to go through the normal channels for approvals. Establish rules regarding each employee’s ability to make decisions should their supervisor not be available. It is also important to cross-train employees in critical job functions so that if one employee is not available, someone else can step in and do their job for the short term.
  • Communicate With Customers: If your operations will be affected (shipping delayed, projects postponed) your customers will be understanding as long as they are informed. Change your phone message to advise them of the situation, or better yet, have real people call each client if possible. Make a notation on your website, and send an email or text to explain the circumstances. The more they know about what you are doing to rectify the situation, the better for future business.
  • Continue IT Operations: If your physical location has been destroyed, you still need to process future orders, collect payments, and pay employees. If those processes are all in-house, you may face a major headache. In 2018, the best thing to do prior to a disaster is to have your data stored offsite and accessible by your employees from their personal devices. This also saves you from losing critical data files forever – which over 40% of businesses never recover from. (Learn More about Cloud-Based Services)
  • Have an Operational Back-Up Plan: After 9-11, businesses nowhere near the tragedy were affected when planes stopped flying. In a less dramatic example, snowstorms in one part of the country may affect shipping routes across the nation. This means that although you may always ship by truck, you may need to consider overnight delivery services for a short period of time. Or perhaps you will need to hire temporary help for a few weeks to help you get back on track. Knowing how you will react, and understanding how it will affect your cash flow, can save you precious time.

These are just a few of the items you may wish to consider when looking into business continuity. The good news is that technology has made communication, data storage, and recovery easier than it has ever been.

The professionals at Alliance IT can provide expert guidance in setting up your IT infrastructure, telecommunications, data storage and cloud services in such a way that you can resume operations most quickly following a disaster.

The more quickly you recover, the more likely your business will continue to thrive.