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You
never know how much you depend on technology until you don't have access to
it anymore. If a disaster strikes, you may not only suffer direct losses of
data and hardware, but indirect losses due to downtime. But with some
foresight and planning, you can avoid sustained downtime—and lost profits.
First,
create a broad, holistic plan to ensure business continuity, not just
disaster recovery. This plan should involve every part of your business,
such as processes, operations, assets, employees and so on. Your overall
goal: to prevent business disruption—then minimize it if it does occur. To
this end, you should:
•
Conduct an impact analysis. How much downtime, loss of productivity, loss of
data, loss of revenues and so on can your company sustain? For how long?
• Develop a plan for dealing with mission-critical (revenue-impacting,
customer-facing) functions and business-critical (back office, supply chain,
e-mail) functions under various disruptive scenarios. Determine which
business technologies to employ.
• Educate your workers about the plan before a crisis occurs.
• From time to time, revisit the plan to make sure it remains practicable
and viable.
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