In the current economic climate protecting your business, and your staff is more crucial than ever. Business continuity experts SunGard offer their top ten tips on the best ways to look after your business.
1. Put your employees first. It is essential that your continuity plans cater to your staff's individual needs and working lives.
2. Have knowledge of an alternative location that is easily accessible to your workers in the event of an invocation. Downtime can have a negative impact on a business of any size but is more likely to be crippling to an SME. Following a major business disruption, over 40% of all businesses without a continuity plan never re-open.
3. Investigate the possibilities of staff working from home if they are unable to access their normal workplace. For instance, employers should be asking whether their employees have access to the internet and can work remotely if needed.
4. Remote workers should not be discounted. If staff work off-site, there should be alternative continuity planning to ensure contact can be made both with the customers and the employees.
5. Ensure several methods of contact with all employees, both on and off-site as the typical methods, like land-lines and email may be experiencing downtime.
6. Ensure data is effectively backed up. Information considered relatively unimportant today could become critical tomorrow
7. It's not always a big disaster that causes downtime There are a myriad of potential causes of disruption to your business. For example, even something as relatively minor as a public transport strike can cause problems for your workers so you may want to provide alternative travel for those facing a tricky commute.
8. Test your business continuity plan at least once a year. This ensures your plan is in sync with business and technology changes.
9. Ensure your suppliers have continuity plans in place as this will dramatically reduce the risk posed to your businesses by others in the supply chain.
10. Don't try to cover everything to the same level. Identify the mission-critical business functions and determine how soon they need to be available following a disaster. You might be able to last for days without an HR function but you would not be able to last as long without an account department.
