The COVID pandemic changed the way people worked, causing many employees to work from home. Yet, only 42% of business owners admit they don’t know how to respond to cyberattacks on their remote employees.
Whether your business lets employees work from home or requires them to come to the office, you need a business continuity plan.
Unfortunately, many business owners don’t understand these plans or take the time to make them. Learning the basics of business continuity plans is the first step toward protecting your business from cyber risks.
If you’re wondering why your company needs a plan like this, read this guide as it explains what it is and why your business needs one.
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Creating a Plan Helps You Understand Its Purpose
Some businesses don’t have business continuity plans because they feel like they don’t have enough risks of attacks. On the other hand, others don’t have one because they don’t realize they need them.
If your business doesn’t have a continuity plan yet, you might want to start learning more about these plans. You’ll likely realize that you need one as you learn more about them.
Additionally, as you work on creating a plan, you’ll understand more about the following things:
- What it is
- Its purposes
- Reasons to develop one
- Your company’s risks
- Benefits of having one
These name just a few of the vital things you’ll learn as you begin creating a plan.
The Four Purposes
A business continuity plan has four main purposes:
- Respond
- Recover
- Resume
- Restore
You can learn more about each of these while reading this guide.
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It Helps You Determine Your Risks
One key part of a business continuity plan is determining risks. What threats does your business face? What is your business risk?
Creating a plan helps you answer these questions, and one of the first steps of creating a plan is completing a Business Impact Analysis. This analysis helps you determine what potential risks your business faces.
For example, is there a risk that your business data could land in the wrong hands? Is there a chance that hackers could break into your computer systems?
It’s much easier to decrease your risks if you identify them. Therefore, identifying your risks is the first tangible step in your plan.
You can do this yourself or get more info from a company that offers services to help businesses protect themselves from disasters and risks. As you begin identifying your risks, you may want to consider the following things:
- What disasters could strike your business?
- What impact would these disasters have on your company?
- What can you do to decrease or avoid these risks?
As you see, the purpose of a business continuity plan is to prepare for these disasters.
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A Business Continuity Plan Decreases Your Risks
After identifying your company’s risks, you can take the appropriate steps to minimize your chances of disasters. It’s important to know that you can decrease some risks, but it’s nearly impossible to eliminate all your risks.
For example, if you have remote workers, you might need to hire an IT company to create the right computer systems and servers for your employees to use at home. This creates a layer of defense against hackers.
Protecting your computer systems is a great way to decrease risks, but it won’t eliminate every risk. Your business also faces the risk of natural disasters destroying information or business structures.
This risk is not one you can minimize, as it’s out of your control. Therefore, it might be helpful to focus on the risks within your control, as these are the only ones you can minimize.
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The Plan Helps You Survive Through Disasters
The first purpose of a plan is to “respond,” as you see above. Responding is the first thing you’ll do when your business faces a disaster, and your response can minimize the damage from the disaster.
Minimizing the damage is a key step in a business continuity plan. You need to know what to do when the attack happens, which means you must prepare for this event.
What will you do when a disaster strikes? In other words, you might need to create a list of initial responses to take.
One vital step many companies take is to create a system for backing up their data. Imagine losing all your company’s data to a cyberattack. Could your business survive through this event?
Creating a system of backing up your data is part of the second step of the plan – “recover.” Disaster recovery is vital, as it refers to avoiding the loss of data.
The last two stages are “resume” and “restore.” Resuming and restoring operations are the steps you take to begin your business operations after the attack.
It Helps You Prepare
Hopefully, your business will never suffer an attack or disaster like the ones described here, but it could. Are you prepared for something like this to happen at your business?
Proper preparation is the only defense you have against exterior threats and attacks. With the proper preparation, your business has a greater chance of survival.
Without the proper preparation, one cyber attack could destroy your business, causing you to lose everything you’ve worked so hard to build.
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Every Business Needs a Continuity Plan in Place
Cyberattacks happen to all kinds of businesses, but your business will have a better chance of surviving if you have a business continuity plan in place. Are you interested in protecting your business from these threats?
You can protect your company by creating a business continuity plan before a disaster strikes.
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