Andrew Stuart offers some IT-focused experience-based business continuity tips :
1. Understand the threat landscape
Storms, ransomware viruses and fires are only some of many real threats for which all businesses should proactively prepare. Your IT department needs a full understanding of all of the threats likely to hit your building, communications room or servers in order to help prepare for the worst. This can be done by assessing risks based on the location and accessibility of your data centres / centers, as well as any malicious attacks that could occur. When planning to mitigate a disaster, treat every incident as unique: a local fire may affect one machine, whereas human error may lead to the deletion of entire servers.
2. Set goals for recovery
While some companies assume they are protected in the wake of a disaster if they duplicate their data, many learn the hard way that their backup stopped functioning during a disaster or their data is inaccessible afterwards. The IT team needs to define criteria for recovery time objectives (RTO), or how long your business can continue to run without access to your data, and recovery point objectives (RPO), which is the maximum age of data that will still be useful to back up. The IT team will also need to identify critical systems and prioritise recovery tasks.
More of the Continuity Central article from Andrew Stuart
