Update! Just one week to go before our last gadget episode of the series ~ make sure to send us any thing you would like reviewed in the forum which is linked below.
What’s in a name? Continuation of Business or COB
The US government website quotes this – “Business continuity impact analysis identifies the effects resulting from disruption of business functions and processes. It also uses information to make decisions about recovery priorities and strategies.” 1.
What companies and individuals want to do is mitigate your risk when you look at how to back up, store and access information.
The headspace of walking out scenarios for companies isn’t all that different than what you do for your home dependant on where you live.
If you have an environment that requires you to have something as a power grid back up, you have generators for high risk premises like a hospital or candles and flashlights if you are in a home without life critical devices
If you live in a part of the world that floods often, you likely have a dam system or – at the very least filled sandbags ready to go!
Continuation of Business is the method around how and when you continue to run your business during adverse times and conditions.
A checklist of the following is always useful when it comes to fhis.
Do a Risk assessment of your firm and decide what assets are the most important to have backed up at another location should you be unable to access where you are. With a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) you highlight which departments need to be running 24/7 and how you will achieve that – as an example – payroll access and the accounting department technology in general should always have redundant plans for obvious reasons.
What is critical to your Business – and what aspects have what I call domino dependencies? As an example – Email and text applications are a critical function to most organizations – you will need those to communicate with the companies personnel. But the domino effect is you can’t communicate if all the devices are not in hand outside of the office environment. Do you need to furnish cellular devices or have laptops at another location or do you have policies in place that ensure that everyone has access to operating systems they would need to make do for 24, 48 or 72 hours – not to mention a year and up?
How will you recover and how do you tie the emergency work arounds back to your integration of the office? The biggest example is today in July of 2021. Countries are opening up slowly after COVID restrictions have been in place for over a year and a half.
So how do you bring forward all the work and decisions that were made within an organization and tie them into a new way of working and communicating as people work out the new normal of doing things. Depending on the company vertical, those questions are very different. A Food and Beverage company allowing on premise patrons will go through a very different check list than the financial vertical like the folks in the banking sector.
Where are your backup and restoration processes? By your organization being down, have you missed upgrading patches to operating systems that are usually rolled in by the IT department? Have the rules changed for PCI compliance or what do you need to make your technology as whole as possible with the ability to support the staff returning?
Finally it is VERY IMPORTANT to test all of the above before there is any emergency – I know, I know – COVID hit all of us quickly and there were many organizations that scrambled in March and April of 2020 to even do baseline functions.
If we have learned anything from this pandemic, let it be that we should be prepared for the worst that may come, but pause a moment every day and enjoy and be grateful for whatever the best is in that day.
Join us next week for our 2nd gadget show – where cool things get reviewed!
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