Does Your Business Have A Business Continuity Plan?
Considerations when implementing a business continuity plan
We just experienced a historical October snow storm in the North East which collapsed the regional electric grid for days. Many businesses were “offline” for days. The question arises, how long can your business afford to be “offline” before significant dollar amounts are lost? How many orders are you not receiving? How many billings are you not
activating? What happens to your business when you are down for several hours, a whole day, or several days? Secondly, how much would it cost to have a contingency plan in place?
If your business has no business continuity plan in place, the following overview of available business continuity products, services, and solutions should provide you with a good starting point.
What specifically is required to keep the business running in case of a disaster?
The primary objective when developing a disaster recovery plan is to take an inventory of critical business functions. This means examining system backups and alternative data and call paths. Secondly, if a disaster (human error or natural disaster) effects your business then how do you restore services quickly or ensure uninterrupted business
functions? First, I’d like to propose a basic step by step business continuity assessment guide:
- Take an inventory of both your data and voice network infrastructure e.g. servers, phone systems, data, applications, routers, etc.
- Design a business continuity solution: Communicate with all departments in your business to be sure that all aspects of the business are covered with respect to your technology needs.
- Research telecommunications and data providers who can assist in designing a solution with appropriate product sets and technologies. Establish which services are most critical and what are the associated costs.
- Implement your solution.
- Test, Test, Test: You must test your business continuity plan. For example, if you are having your calls re-routed to another phone number or locations then test the fail-over service with your service provider. If you are using a cloud data storage service then make sure that your data can be restored easily and quickly.
In the next section, I will provide a broad overview of available products and services which help ensure that your technology infrastructure continues to work.
Automatic Voice Fail-Over: If your host or main location has lost phone service because of a major power outage, you could have your calls automatically rerouted to any other phone number. That would include cell phones, a secondary location, a toll free number, or an answering service. Many of the providers I work with offer this
ability.
VoIP/POTS Service: Traditional POTS (Plain Ordinary Telephone Service) which is offered by your local telephone company may be interrupted during a snow storm, however, your cable connection may still operate. You could provision a VoIP phone service over the existing cable connection. This setup would enable you to make and receive phone calls while the primary POTS service in being repaired.
3G Wireless: If both cable and POTS service to one or more of your locations is down (this is rare but could happen) then you may want to consider connecting over the air e.g. 3G/4G or even MPLS 3G. You could utilize the 3G or 4G connection for both voice and data services.
MPLS: If your business has multiple locations, an MPLS network provides an inherent recovery solution because of its fully meshed network infrastructure. MPLS routing capabilities would automatically reroute your data and voice traffic to another path in the event of an outage.
Data Backup and Recovery: During a network failure, whether natural disaster or human error, consider storing your data off-site in a secure and encrypted data storage facility. There are many options available for data storage through cloud storage providers. Make sure that your data is encrypted end to end and that your data is easily
restored from any location you choose.
This post should provide your business with a good starting point in developing your business continuity plan, feel free to contact me if you require assistance in evaluating technologies and provider options.
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