Planning

Do you have a small business? What are you doing to ensure your business will be able to continue after a major (or minor) disaster event? How many days can your business be down and still recover?

How sensitive is your business to the loss of location? How about a power outage that would last several days? Is your business highly computerized – is it sensitive to hacking or virus attacks? Do you back up your data monthly, weekly, or daily? Where are those back ups stored?

Is your business web based? Where is your website hosted? Do you have a back up plan in place if your host goes down?

These are all important questions to ask. We all know about the big events – 9/11, Katrina, the Midwestern floods of 2008 to name a few. Some small business owners have taken these big disasters into consideration. We hear every day about fires all around the country that destroy businesses. It happens. Web servers are hacked – bank accounts are attacked.

Being “in the business” of continuity, I sometimes forget that not everyone is as aware of what can damage their business as I am. When I watch the news or read an article online – I see the potential for a business interruption. And then I start thinking about what can be done to reduce or eliminate the interruption from that cause.

Having a plan in place is like having an insurance policy. You buy the policy with the hope that you will never need to use it, but knowing it is there gives you a little bit of security.

Like that insurance policy, once the plan is created it needs an occasional review and update. Testing is as important as planning. Updating to cover changes in the business and new threats is as important as testing.

If you don’t have any plan at all – start small. Get some basics in place. Make sure your computers/servers/websites are backed up. Assure those back ups are being stored offsite. If you’re not technical, build a relationship with a business that can help you.

Look around your business (inside and out) and determine what sort of events could threaten your business. Put it on paper. Create a simple table – put the threats you discover in one column, and what you could do to avoid those threats or recover from incidents in another column.

And just like that, you’ve begun to plan.