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3 Common Obstacles to Business Continuity Planning
Lack of Resources
Resources are always precious to companies, especially when they’re starting out, or in the middle of a growth spiral. Since businesses are dedicated to growth, the natural impulse of any business is to allocate as many resources as possible to growth-oriented projects. Most companies don’t perceive business continuity programs as growth-oriented. It is a defensive measure at best and actually takes valuable resources away from growth-oriented projects. There are many reasons why business continuity programs may even seem like a nuisance when things are going well. However, if and when things do go south, having the right business continuity program in place can be the only reason your business survives in the long run. While we understand that maintaining resource allocation for business continuity can be difficult when companies are barely meeting the budgets to keep things operational – there are ways to make the process easier. One key requirement is to determine the exact costs of the business continuity program and have a clear budget. Compare these costs with an impact (cost) analysis on your business should things go wrong. The latter is pretty much always significantly higher than the cost of maintaining the program. IT Support Joplin offers extensive business continuity solutions for local businesses.
Lack of Internal Support
Once you have got the cost-benefit analysis out of the way, you still need to get everyone in your organization on board – starting from the top. You may well find it difficult to get buy-in, especially at the upper levels of leadership who may be much more inclined to allocate resources towards growth-oriented projects and risk management but not to prepare for disruptions that may or may not happen. One way of convincing them could be through the use of real-life examples of businesses similar to yours and a detailed analysis of exactly where things went wrong. You need to underline the fact that investing in business continuity programs means that your business will stay afloat – irrespective of the circumstance you find yourself in. Moreover, an effective plan can also prevent things from going wrong in the first place in your business.
No access to the right tools and technology
At its core, a business continuity program is technical and deals with technical issues (with a large business footprint) such as data loss, equipment/ software malfunction or failure, loss of mission-critical infrastructure components like communications systems, and more. Depending on the nature of your business and your business continuity program, you may very well need to deploy specific technologies on solutions tailored to your unique circumstances. This could include deploying tools or technology, such as incident management software, satellite systems, 5G connectivity, and more. You also need to balance these technology investments with your technical budget. Seasoned experts at IT Consulting Joplin can help your business extensively with Business Continuity Plans and Business Continuity Management.
Why Does Business Continuity Planning fail?
Lack of attention to detail
It is common for businesses with no previous experience of business continuity planning to overlook critical details and have unrealistic expectations. For instance, it is quite common for many businesses to assume that electricity, cell phone networks, landlines, Internet, and water services will continue as usual or that roads will remain open. While that may very well be the case depending on the nature of the disaster your business has to face, it is very much a coin toss. In planning for disaster scenarios, you cannot count on anything to happen as usual. You cannot count on people showing up to work (if they are able to reach you at all), people carrying out their duties as usual, or having access to all of your essential utilities. If you need access to any or all of these to keep your business running, you need to innovate and find ways to have multiple backup options for all of these critical elements.
Focusing on the wrong things
Many businesses assume that their responsibility in conducting business continuity drills ends at backing up their servers every night. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, backing up your data and applications is just part of your overall IT plan, and does not constitute a business continuity plan under any circumstance. To start off with, you need to focus on keeping communication channels open and disruption-free during the crisis. This will enable you to have open communication with all your staff members when they need guidance and must keep you updated on a minute-to-minute basis. Of course, this also needs to take into account that your mail servers may be down along with essential phone lines and cell networks.
Planning done by people with little to no experience of disasters
This kind of planning can truly land a company in hot water. The problem is that people who don’t have the experience of living through disaster scenarios often don’t quite understand both the causal links (chain reactions) and the unexpected fallouts that may come into play in such circumstances. This is why they often end up making the wrong assumptions and of course, ending up at the wrong conclusions. Even if you want your business continuity planning handled by your own team, you must get help from a Certified Business Continuity Professional (in-house or third-party) to guide you through your planning process. They must be trained and have a concrete experience of living through disaster scenarios in similar environments. If your company is looking for Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery, look no further than Business Continuity Services.
