Northern Lakes Economic Alliance • 231-582-6482
Buck Love, Business Retention & Growth
What will your business do in the wake of a disaster? Bojana Dobran offers a definition and purpose for Business Continuity Planning in an article from July 28, 2018:
Business Continuity planning is threat prevention or handling strategy. The purpose of this strategy is to list out all the potential risks or threats that may affect a business’s operations. Once identified, lay out the appropriate policies and procedures for what to do to mitigate these issues if they do occur. Implementation will ensure that your company will remain operational even in the wake of a disaster.
For many new businesses in the start-up or early growth phases, this likely isn’t part of your thinking with all the many tasks being handled to grow your company. However, without this type of contingency planning, failure is almost certain.
Dobran provides these steps for Business Continuity Planning:
As you look to incorporate Business Continuity, the first challenge is to review your business structure.
- Identify the business-critical processes in addition to the systems that enable them to run.
- Next, identify which measures (such as data backup) are already in place. At this point, you can search for all documentation that will enable the recreation of these systems.
- Your organization should have a designated team member in charge of disaster management. This individual (or management team) will be responsible for reinstating the company infrastructure in the wake of a disaster. While this role may not be a full-time one in most organizations, it is imperative that you have somebody who will oversee the disaster recovery plan.
- Finally, you should assign roles to other team members on what they can do in case of a problem. Training, both initial and ongoing, is imperative for this role to succeed.
The NLEA is committed to retaining and growing our regional employer base and would like to know:
- Does your company have a Business Continuity/Disaster Plan in place?
- Would you like more information on this topic in the form of educational forums?
- Would you be willing to be part of a panel discussion to share your planning process with other businesses?
Please respond to buck@northernlakes.net and see this link for a more in-depth discussion on this topic https://phoenixnap.com/blog/business-continuity-planning.
