The general goal of a disaster or business continuity plan is to improve the level of responsiveness by employees in different situations that might interfere with the daily operations of your business.
Like preparing for disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes, or other events that are unpredictable, a disaster plan or business continuity plan requires all members to be on board to make it work efficiently.
- Information-gathering phase – In this phase you will get information and data that applies to your situation planning for a possible emergency or disaster and do a business impact analysis and a risk assessment. In other words, during this stage, you are looking at the worst case scenario and predicting how much downtime you might experience from a disaster such as a cyber-attack, storm outage, or loss of connection that may result in lost files or data.
- Planned development – In this stage you will plan how you are going to carry out your business continuity plan and how you will recover from a possible disaster by using all the resources you have available. Your plan development could be in the shape of a pyramid with the top being business continuity which is a state of full operations, risk management under that, and Information Technology recovery near the bottom. You will utilize your server storage and network to serve as a backup strategy so that you will always have your data in the event of such an emergency situation.
- Plan testing maintenance and updating – In this stage, you will plan and test out some of the important aspects of your disaster plan. You may want to back up and make some changes that will allow you to stay current and to make sure your plan is going to work on all levels. You need to rehearse an unplanned event and go through a drill much like you would have fire or tornado drill to make sure everything works as planned. If you find it lacking, you should evaluate the effectiveness of your plan and how it fits areas that need improving.
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