Business Continuity: The Basics - Part 1

What is business continuity?

A business continuity plan is put in place to ensure an organisation can continue business as usual in the event of a disruption or disaster.

Maersk, the conglomerate with activities in the transport, logistics and energy sectors suffered a Ransomware attack in June 2017. The entire network was down for days and was reported to cost the firm $200-300 million.

The best place to start a business continuity plan (BCP) is to understand from a strategic level what business systems are critical to completing vital business functions. This could include technologies that allow taking monetary transactions and communicating with customers. Websites, digital assets, CRM systems that effect the customer, MS NAV etc, in essence the core systems that your business must have in order to operate.

What would happen if your business disappeared for days or weeks? What would happen to your customers, services and staff? Haemorrhaging cash because of lost sales, loss of competitive edge, unhappy customers and a heavily tainted reputation are among some consequences that could await.

The threats to your business

What could cause such an outage? Well there’s the usual physical concerns such as power cuts, burst pipes, floods and fires. Every eventuality must be considered in your business continuity plan, if your office was no longer workable, where would your staff work from? If they could work at all that is.

In addition to these occurrences businesses are facing a growing threat in cyber-attacks like Ransomware. Strains such as WannaCry, Petya and BadRabbit have the capability to lock your data down rendering your business useless.

Ransomware is a growing threat affecting a number of businesses in the UK, some cases often mean these companies are forced to close their doors due to irreversible damage and having no disaster recovery in place.

Business continuity is not an academic nerdy discussion between techies, it’s something that should be on the agenda of every board meeting. Many businesses could be affected beyond repair if disaster strikes and there is no data backup.

So what’s next?…

Business Continuity: The Basics Part 2 will be released soon so stay tuned.

We’re hosting a business continuity webinar on Wednesday 13th December. We’ll be talking about how your business can avoid downtime.

Webinar Agenda:

• What do we mean by disaster?

• The difference between DR & backup

• Hierarchy of backup and disaster recovery

• Disaster examples including Ransomware – How can Datto help?

• Case study: How Datto helped Chadwick Lawrence

Register here for the Business Continuity Webinar: Disaster Recovery and Backup