Practical Business Continuity: What Does it Mean for Your Business?

What is “business continuity” and what does it mean to your business? A quick search on Wikipedia says that business continuity “is an interdisciplinary concept used to create and validate a practiced logistical plan for how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical (urgent) function(s) within a predetermined time after a disaster or extended disruption”. That’s a good technical definition but it is not particularly helpful in telling the average business owner what to do to protect his or her business.

Most large businesses have some sort of plan in place for hurricanes, earthquakes, catastrophic power failures, cyber attacks, viruses, etc. In the end they tend to lose more data from disgruntled employees anyway. For small businesses, planning is much less complex but is often ignored. Chances are your hard drive will simply fail and you will lose data. No hurricane, no virus, no disgruntled employees. But in the end the effect is the same. You have lost mission critical data and now you have to scramble to maintain momentum in your business and serve your clients.

All businesses, even the small ones, need some way to safeguard their companies in case things go south. Business owners should think about continuity planning as a “self-insurance” policy. We buy business insurance to protect our firms from things that are beyond our control. Why not write your own policy for things that are within your control?

If you own a software or records management company then you probably already have pretty sophisticated disaster recovery plans in place. But what if you own a small consulting practice or work in a professional field such as the accounting or legal profession? These individuals are extremely susceptible to data and document loss but rarely do more than back up files from time to time on a flash drive or central server. These companies also have data and documents spread out over a widely distributed workforce on laptops and tend to outsource many basic functions. Outsourcing alone means that a business’ command and control over critical business information is further compromised. This can also be a risk for any company with a geographically based sales force. So how do you protect your business?

First, decide what is important to your business. In most cases the business information on your hard drive is all you need to rebuild your business and maintain momentum. Your financials, sales data, customer lists, client documents, etc. tend to be resident on a single PC for each employee.

Once you’ve identified the “gotta have” data a documents make sure that you organize it. Put all your key data into a single directly on your hard drive. In my business, each venture I own with my business partner has its own directory. In this way I can have an extremely complex sub-directory structure that logically organizes my information, but from a continuity perspective all I have to do is make sure that just one directory is backed up to protect the whole venture.

Find a solution that works for you. The problem with burning CD’s or backing things up on external hard drives or flash drives is that external drives fail and you can lose a flash drive. Additionally, we can be our own worst enemy. By depending on ourselves, we have to remember to save data and documents not just periodically, but each time we create a new document or make a significant change to our data. I don’t know about you, but when I am in the middle of my busy day I am not thinking about business continuity – I am thinking about serving my clients.

What does this mean? It means that once you have organized your data you need to find a solution that solves the problem in the following ways:

1. Copies critical data to a remote location.
2. Ensures that data is backed up without your proactive intervention but without preventing you from being proactive.
3. The solution must account for the hierarchy in your business. Each employee, contractor, vendor and even clients can have data automatically backed up into a centralized location.
4. Make sure that you can easily recover and access backed up data. Simply zipping data files up and shipping them offsite does protect the data, but leaves you dead in the water for a time as you try to recover. Make sure you can rebuild your data structure with a few clicks.
5. Ensure that you can find what you need quickly. A solution that bundles all your data into one bucket without offering a sophisticated search function may leave you in a lurch as you try to respond to clients during your recovery process.

There are a variety of tools that could work for your business. My firm (http://www.ifconnect.com/) and its parent company have determined that although there a many good solutions out there, most fall short in some way. So in November 2008 we are introducing Praura (see http://www.praura.com/). The first iteration of Praura will blend some basic collaboration and document management functionality with simple to use fully automated disaster recovery features. This fully integrates your business continuity solution with you core business operations, resulting in cost savings and superior protection for your business.

Whatever works for your business, it is important that you find a way to protect against the unforseeen. A little self insurance never hurt anyone and the responsibility for protecting your data is yours, after all.