When running a business, business continuity is extremely important in helping to find risks and solutions for your business. Having good business continuity can involve things such as setting priorities and steps in responding to any incident. When creating your business continuity plan, be mindful of budgets, resources, and staffing that will be available after a crisis happens and how to use those resources most effectively. Several organizations will publish what they believe to be good guidelines for business continuity, but a few key facets remain the same throughout the lists.

Potential Threats

When starting your business continuity plan, you want to determine all potential threats and analyze them. Whenever there is a potential threat, it could disrupt your business in several ways, including data breaches or natural disasters. The best thing to do for these threats is to brainstorm what is potential and how your business can recover from the threat. When making these plans, take nothing off the table as anything is possible to happen.

Process Driven Plan Issues

A business continuity plan should cover a broad spectrum of potential threats as anything can happen. The plan you create should not include specific resolutions for specific issues such as fires, flu pandemics, power failures, or IT issues. The reason that you do not want to use a plan such as this is if the issue is not an exact fit to what is in the plan, the resolution will not work. The plan should have processes that fit generic issues or threats and then a solution to fix anything in that category.

Updated Plans

Once a plan is in place, there needs to be a contingency plan in place to make sure that all documentation in the plan remains up to date. If there happened to be a threat or issue that occurred, you don’t want to be caught not having updated documents and processes and not being able to recover from the issue as quickly as possible. These documents could be anything from a list of contacts to instructions on how to recover from the current problem being faced.

Business contingency plans are essential to a business. Having good business continuity can involve things such as setting priorities and steps in responding to any incident. When creating your business continuity plan, be mindful of budgets, resources, and staffing that will be available after a crisis happens and how to use those resources most effectively.

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