Surviving a disaster – your business continuity plan

Many small business owners don’t think they have time to prepare for a potential disaster that may never come. The reality is that a disaster will happen, and without preparation you can’t afford the consequences. It’s time to stop, step back and consider “what is important for the survival of my business?”

Plan for the worst

You need to be a realist when it comes to disaster preparedness – it’s not a case of “if” a disaster will strike, but “when”. Once a disaster hits your business, do you know what is important to keep your business going? Are you sure which activities you need to concentrate on so your business will survive? By asking yourself these questions you’re creating a business continuity plan.

A business continuity plan identifies:

• which things you will focus on when a disaster strikes
• how you will prepare to keep those important things going after a disaster

Make prioritizing a priority

When a disaster strikes you’ll have to choose which parts of your business to try keep running. You must prioritize – it’s not cost effective to try and keep everything going. Also, disasters can come in many forms and have different flow-on effects. For example, after an earthquake you may lose power, or networks, or water or a combination of these. There are too many variables to plan a response for each one.

So what do you do?

Create a plan

First, hold yourself accountable to making a plan. Put some time in your calendar so this doesn’t get pushed out of the way. Sit down and work through these questions:

• What processes do you use in your business?

Your processes will fall under three main areas: management processes, operational processes and supporting processes. These can cover anything from recruitment to taking customer orders to offering technical support. Any one of these would no longer be possible if a major disaster took place. Think about the things that are done on a daily basis to keep your business running. 

• What is the impact on your business if you can’t perform one of these processes?

This may seem artificial as you usually don’t lose processes one at a time, but it helps in working out which are the most important. Do this for each process and come up with a list of the critical processes.

• What resources are required to keep the critical processes operating?

It helps to put resources into categories like staff, premises, infrastructure for IT and communications, and suppliers.

• How can those resources be protected in a cost effective way?

Once you’ve honed in on your most critical resources, you can come up with a way to protect them in case something happens. This means you won’t have to worry about backing up every part of your business if you can run everything from a laptop and a cell phone. 

• How can the resources be recovered following a disaster?

Even with that laptop and cell phone there will come a time when you want to get everything back up and running the way it was before the accident happened. 

Use your answers to the last two questions to create a document of your protection and recovery strategies. This is your business continuity plan. Make sure the document is in a format that you can review and update on a regular basis.

Don’t just plan – action!

Creating a plan isn’t the final step. The plan itself is not much use unless you put your strategies in place and train your staff. Make sure everyone knows what actions to take when a disaster strikes. Consider where you store your plan as you’ll need to access it in an emergency.

Practice

At Xero we regularly practice our disaster recovery plans. We plan a ‘disaster’ to happen and then send an email to the fist person, alerting them to what happened. It’s then their job to notify the correct people, get everyone communicating, and work through the plan. We’ve practiced earthquakes, fires and electrical outages. Each time a different person takes point. We run through everything from communicating with customers to retrieving data to working with third parties to get things back up and running.

When you run through your scenario with your staff you can easily spot where your plan is missing something or it falls short. You can also use these drills to get everyone familiar with the plan. The more complicated the plan, the more often you need to run through it to make sure everyone is on the same page.

The cloud and disaster preparedness

Cloud computing is a strategy to protect your business’s IT and communications infrastructure. With cloud computing, your information is stored in industrial-sized data centers with state-of-the-art security and disaster protection systems. Desktop software stores your information on-site, so it’s only as secure as your premises.

The cloud computing supplier ensures your information is protected. They hire the experts you can’t afford and look after your information 24 hours a day. At Xero, we do this for your accounting and business information. However there are many other companies that can do this for other aspects of you business.

If suddenly your work and home computers were lost would you still be able to run your business? Would you have all the data you needed to move forward without skipping a beat? If the answer to either of those is no then you need to consider backing up all your data in the cloud.

Putting your information in the cloud provides a new level of reliability compared to desktop or onsite storage. It also gives you the ability to work from almost anywhere. This should position cloud computing high in your business continuity strategies. Cloud computing services can help relieve some of the headaches of data protection, giving you space to look after the busy work of your business.

Murray Tracey is the Business Continuity Manager at Xero.

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