Creating an effective Business Continuity Solution

First things first, Business Continuity isn’t just backup!, check this slideshare to understand the whole Business Continuity concept.

A basic business continuity solution should include the following.

1. Disaster Recovery (DR) Planning

Every business continuity solution begins with rigorous planning. This top-level review involves identifying threats, defining processes, and creating strategies to mitigate damage.

2. Employee Training

Who’s responsible in times of crisis? When disaster strikes, every second counts—and SMEs can’t afford to waste time delegating new roles to untrained employees. DR planning involves coordinated employee education that assigns specific roles and responsibilities to team members, guaranteeing that everyone knows their role when the pressure is on.

3. Customer Awareness Protocols

After a catastrophe, your servers can be rebuilt—but the damage done to your customer relationships is irreparable. Business continuity strategies take all necessary steps to avoid costly service downtime, but if downtime occurs, they respond with comprehensive customer outreach that informs buyers of the issues, offers restitution for their trouble, and helps safeguard the company’s reputation.

4. Intelligent Malware Detection

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; this adage is particularly true for malware and ransomware detection. By the time the issues are detected, the damage is already done. SMEs need to focus on prevention strategies that proactively monitor and review system behavior for known malware patterns and quarantine the corrupted elements before damage occurs.

5. Automated Backup of Crucial Data

When data is housed in on-premise servers and those servers are damaged, there’s no getting back the information lost. Effective DR plans address this by instituting regular backups of all data, which will ideally be stored locally and in sync with a secured cloud server. Comprehensive DR plans will automate these backups down to a minute and provide verifications to ensure their viability.

6. Data Restoration and Instant Virtualization

Through a structured system of data backups, SMEs can restore any data lost in an emergency, from a few files to a whole server. Quality DR plans include instant virtualization services that allow users to access their backed-up data with just a few clicks.

Disaster Is Inevitable, but Damage Isn’t

SMEs need to take a long, hard look at their current business continuity solutions and decide whether they truly offer end-to-end security. Most security service providers offer silo’d parts of these workflows, but without a comprehensive plan to tie them all together, the company will be vulnerable. Shore up your company’s weak points with a structured business continuity plan that keeps your organization safe.