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Planning to Ensure Business Continuity

Planning to Ensure Business Continuity

With the current disruption to the business economy due to COVID-19, creating or refining a business continuity plan now may be the key to long-term survival.

PBO Advisory Group recently teamed up with Rad On Point Consulting, TW2 Marketing and centrexIT for a webinar guiding businesses through development of a continuity plan to prepare for adverse situations. The webinar provided insights into specific areas that included:

  • Outlining the three stages of developing a risk plan (preparation, response and recovery)
  • How to identify potential future risks and develop a spreadsheet to help prioritize risk areas
  • How to develop a crisis communications plan BEFORE a crisis occurs
  • Identifying a spokesperson and outlining the “who, what, where, when and how”
  • How to protect your data so if a crisis occurs its recoverable with zero errors
  • How to prioritize critical IT systems and how frequently to test them

 
We’ve made the webinar available in full, which includes a sample crisis planning worksheet.

Lana Radchenko of Rad On Point Consulting emphasized that 90% of businesses without a disaster recovery plan fail in the event of a crisis. It’s important to understand that different threats require different responses and to address specific risks and the business impact of each in your plan. For example, a wildfire, cybersecurity attack or pandemic each threaten different aspects of a business. Lana explained how to prioritize risk areas in a sample worksheet.

Teresa Warren from TW2 Marketing highlighted the importance of developing a crisis communications plan in advance, so you’re not scrambling to figure out how to communicate during a crisis. She discussed prioritizing the identification of internal and external audiences and determining who will communicate with each. Teresa recommended that businesses develop if/then scenarios and talking points for various crises and explain how communications will address each scenario in the plan.

Grant Page of centrexIT revealed that 58% of cybersecurity attacks targeted small businesses in 2018 and that these attacks are a major threat to IT systems and business-critical data.  He emphasized the importance of practicing the “3-2-1 backup rule” which allows businesses to safeguard recovered data with zero errors. Grant explained how to prioritize critical systems and determine which need to come back online first in the event of a failure.

We encourage you to reach out to the panelists if you would like further explanation or assistance with implementing a business continuity plan.

 
We’re here to help. The above information provides a general business continuity planning overview. Please contact any member of the PBO team and we will be glad to help you refine or develop a business continuity plan.