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Business Continuity- Can you Stay Open in the Event of a Disaster?

When disaster strikes and business is disrupted, it’s guaranteed to cost the business considerably due to lost revenues, lost or damaged equipment, or a hit to your reputation. And in most cases, insurance does not cover all costs and cannot replace customers that switch to your competitors. A business continuity plan is designed to keep the doors open and the business operational in the event of a disaster, which is why as a management consulting company, we highly recommend that you build a comprehensive business continuity plan. But where do you start? 

Firstly, determine your greatest risk pots depending on situations like a global pandemic, natural disasters, utility outages, climate change, and cybercrime, as some examples. This list should be specific to your industry and operations. For each category, list all possible outcomes. For example, frozen pipes burst, causing water damage, supply chain disruptions, or a cybersecurity threat. Regardless of what your risks are, you’ll want to think about, “If this situation happened, what would need to happen for me to stay operational”?  

When considering how you’ll stay open in the event of a disaster, you’ll want to think about your power needs. For example, what size of a back-up generator will you need, and what is the length of time for support? 

You’ll also want to consider having backup servers, so you don’t lose access to important documents or any online function of your business. We recommend that you protect your critical data in the Cloud, with a reliable service that routinely copies, compresses, and encrypts your company’s documents before sending them to a secure offsite data center. However, note that routine regular back-ups are NOT business continuity! Business continuity is access to reliable backups and the ability to switch to an alternative processing capability to stay operational.  

Additionally, do you have the right insurance coverage in case these situations happen? We recommend contacting your insurance agent to find out if your policy is adequate. And if you haven’t yet, consider Business Interruption Insurance, which compensates you for lost income if you have to close your doors when disaster strikes. 

And lastly, you’ll need to test out your contingency plans. Conduct annual drills with your staff to ensure they know what to do in the event of these types of emergencies. Running these annual drills will also show you where your plans need fine-tuning. 

Sāgin has this experience in building business continuity plans for our clients. In 2019, our client Second City saw they needed to upgrade their internal processes and technology and outsourced their IT operations to us. SAGIN worked with Second City to migrate hardware, software, email, and communications to cloud-based solutions while upgrading its IT infrastructure and communication lines. The finance team also re-evaluated insurance coverage and realigned the coverage with the risks associated with the business. Because of their preparedness, they could bounce back quickly after a massive fire took out their main headquarters.  

SAGIN, LLC is a professional services firm which provides services in consulting, technology and talent management. If you would like to learn more about these solutions, you can contact us at: +1.312.281.0290 or info@saginllc.com. Also visit us at www.saginllc.com

 

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