10 tips to ensure your business' operational continuity

In today’s highly dynamic global marketplace, planning and preparedness are the best defenses against emergency situations. It is important to have a detailed plan in place outlining the actions needed to maintain business operations in times of emergencies.

Failure to plan ahead may result in lost revenue, lower productivity and customer dissatisfaction, as well as damage to the company’s brand reputation.

While, in some cases, certain factors are external and beyond control, there are still ways to prepare and cope with unforeseeable situations, thus mitigating significant losses for the company. Here are the following ten tips for businesses and governments that can help ensure operational continuity.

Plan in advance. Avoid developing a plan in the midst of a crisis itself. Anticipate potential problems and have a well-documented, comprehensive plan ready to address both disaster recovery and the continuity of essential business processes.

Assess your risk. Organizations should look into their operational and financial exposures to determine their risk levels. Decisions should also be based on the principles of risk management, and identify critical business functions and processes in order to deploy assets to help maintain seamless operations during down times.

Create a strong partner ecosystem. Select business partners whose resources are readily available with complimentary skillsets to assist in recovery and continuity efforts.

Protect critical networks, systems and applications. Assess vulnerabilities that will paralyze operations due to fault in critical equipment and application. Also determine the best location for these services to help reduce catastrophic outages and provide rapid recovery response time.

Deploy networks engineered to meet changing business requirements. Develop and implement cost-effective networks that meet bandwidth requirements for continuous operations while delivering a return on investment.

Use cloud- and network-based services for redundancy to support critical operations. Cloud- and network-based services enable access to important information, the rapid restoration of service and the ability to quickly switch services to alternative sites.

A combination of diverse network routing and the ability to duplicate mission-critical applications is essential to the continuity of critical business operations.

Develop telecommuting programs. Applications such as remote access and conferencing help improve recovery time and maintain employees’ connectedness and productivity in extreme circumstances. This will help facilitate communications.

Train and educate your employees. An organization is only as good as its people. Design an effective distributed-work business model, and ensure employees have the training and tools to do their jobs – in the office, on the road or at home. Perform skills-set assessments to understand staffing requirements necessary to support continuous operations.

Utilize social media. Social media outlets play an important role in keeping stakeholders, including customers and employees, connected and informed during an emergency, especially when traditional methods of communications may be unavailable. They provide timely updates to ensure critical information reaches the targeted audiences.

Review, test and refresh – continually. Once a plan has been developed, it must be reviewed, tested and refreshed. A business continuity plan is a living document and a critical business asset. Plans should be routinely updated and tested throughout the year to accommodate with the dynamic changes in today’s economic landscape.

Even though there are no absolute methods to help eradicate losses, it is essential for companies to prepare in advance for such unforeseeable situations. Ultimately, being prepared and having a plan in place can help to ensure that losses can be mitigated and operations can carry on smoothly.