Two Plans you Need to Have in Place

We presume you have a Business Plan, where company goals and objectives and the methodology for achieving them are established. Basically, it’s a road map to success and company growth. Every enterprise should have this plan written out.

If there’s one thing that has been evident, at least since the start of COVID, is that every company MUST additionally have these have two specific written plans in place as well.

As a Managed Services Provider (MSP) and longtime member of the Charlotte IT Support Community, ITFirm.com has collaborated with our clients and set up comprehensive Backup and Disaster Recovery Plans (BDRPs) and the role it plays within the larger-scope Business Continuity Plan (BCP), but the responsibility for BDRP implementation lies almost entirely with your IT team.

Business Continuity Plan

A solid BCP ensures that your business has a clear path to continuing operations in the face of any of a number of catastrophic events. These events don’t send you a warning memo – they are typically complete surprises, except when a massive fire is uncontained, a mile away, and the winds are blowing hard in your direction. The same goes with a hurricane that’s predicted to take a left turn around Wilmington and endanger the Charlotte area. At that point, the idea that you may need to exercise your BCP should be uppermost on your mind – you cannot wait until a disaster reaches your parking lot.

If you experience an impending catastrophe that comes with an advance warning, WHICH is when the actionable points of a BCP need to be marshalled immediately. If you think you can just dust off the pan and read through for the first time since it was written, you’ve got one foot in ruination. Emergency plans need to be tested regularly – just as an office building performs mandatory fire drills.

A BCP is not just an emergency escape plan, although the elements that protect your workforce and get them to safety need to be included. Once your workers are out of harm’s way, the BCP should address any factors that would prevent you from immediately continuing your business operations. Solid solutions to various disaster scenarios need to be included.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has developed a comprehensive guide to writing and instituting a BCP, and it is available through their ‘Ready’ site.

Disaster can take many forms. It can happen to everybody, or it can just happen to you. COVID and the ensuing lockdowns forced just about everyone to reconfigure their business model, setting up employees with remote connections to the office.. It was, and is, a big deal, but insofar as requiring a quick shift to enable employees to work from home, but there was a reasonable amount of time to put the change into effect. If there is a fire in your office building, you do not have the luxury of time - you must leave immediately.

If a disaster destroys your workplace, your BCP should include where your staff will continue working. COVID did prepare us to be able to work from home, so office staff should continue working fairly quickly. Depending on your industry, other aspects of your enterprise need to be addressed, such as any manufacturing capabilities.

If none of your computing operations are in the cloud and you have no cloud data backup system, you’ got big trouble. If your local server melts in the fire, there may be no way to salvage your data. That will very possibly put you out of business.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan

This is only the Information Systems part of your BCP, but it must be its own self-contained plan, developed with close consultation with your IT support team, whether in-house or outsourced with a Managed Services Provider.

Your BDRP plan will ensure that the correct steps are taken to safely backup and store your data in a secured place. In the event of a disaster, either natural or man-made (like a Ransomware attack), your IT services people will use these backups to restore your network to full functionality.

The most prevalent and common threat to businesses worldwide is Ransomware – and it’s still growing. An untrained end user clicks on a malicious link or attachment in an email and it locks up your system, bars you from network access, and encrypts your data so it becomes unusable to you. Then the perpetrators demand a ransom to be paid in cryptocurrency before they will give you the decryption key.

At ITFirm.com, we cannot count the number of businesses who became our clients after experiencing a Ransomware attack. Unfortunately, this scenario is not uncommon at all. Too many networks and backup systems are set up badly by inferior ‘IT Guys’, and the backups are either corrupted or unretrievable. These ‘low-knowledge’ IT posers are typically the cheapest, but offer the worst service. IT Support is not a game for amateurs.

Spend the money on a Managed IT Services firm. Your business may depend on it.