September marks National Preparedness Month and is a useful reminder to chief information officers and business continuity specialists that plans should be regularly reviewed, tested and updated.
Despite a slower than anticipated start to the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season, Mother Nature has the potential at any time to adversely impact critical business operations and the delivery of government services.
“The single best defense against emergency situations is planning for the unanticipated,” said Matt Tuttle, executive director of consulting services, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “Today’s fast-paced, hyper-connected world underscores the importance of creating well documented and detailed operational continuity plans to help reduce adverse impacts on service delivery, productivity and revenues, as well as organizational reputation. Simply stated, the time to plan is before a business-impacting event occurs.”
The following recommendations and best practices from Verizon’s business continuity experts can help businesses and government agencies prepare for and cope with events that can impact normal operations.
- Plan in advance. Developing a plan in the midst of a crisis is a recipe for disaster. Anticipate potential problems and have a well-documented, comprehensive plan to address both disaster recovery and continuity of essential business operations.
Assess your risk. Organizations should assess business models and networks to identify risks, as well as operational and financial exposures. Base decisions on the principles of risk management, and identify critical business functions and processes in order to deploy assets to help maintain seamless operations. - Create a strong partner ecosystem. Select business partners with resources that can be readily available for rapid deployment to assist in recovery and continuity efforts.
- Protect critical networks, systems and applications. Inventory critical equipment and applications, and assess vulnerabilities. Determine the best location for these services to help reduce catastrophic disruptions and provide rapid recovery response time.
- Engineer flexible and resilient networks. Deploy networks that meet bandwidth requirements and help maintain continuous operations while delivering a return on investment.
- Use cloud- and network-based services for redundancy. A combination of diverse network routing and the ability to duplicate mission-critical applications is essential to communications and the continuity of critical business operations. Cloud- and network-based services enable access to important information, the rapid restoration of service and the ability to quickly switch services to alternative sites.
Develop telecommuting programs. Applications such as remote access and conferencing help improve recovery time and maintain employees’ connectedness and productivity in extreme circumstances. - Train and educate your employees. An organization is only as good as its people. Design an effective distributed-work business model, and ensure employees have the training and tools to do their jobs – in the office, on the road or at home. Perform skills-set assessments to understand staffing requirements necessary to support continuous operations.
- Utilize social media. Social media outlets play an important role in keeping stakeholders, including customers and employees, connected and informed during an emergency, especially when traditional methods of communications may be unavailable.
- Review, test and refresh – continually. Once a plan has been developed, it must be reviewed, tested and refreshed. A business continuity plan is a living document and a critical business asset. Plans should be routinely updated and tested throughout the year.
See related news release on Verizon’s all-hazards approach to emergency management and preparedness.
Verizon offers a comprehensive portfolio of advanced networking, IT and communications solutions and professional consulting services that can be leveraged by businesses and governments to create robust business-continuity programs.
In addition, the company’s fully managed Virtualized Disaster Recovery service enables customers to replicate operating systems, applications and data into a secure cloud-computing environment within a Verizon Terremark data center. Verizon’s cloud-based Voice over IP (VoIP) service, Virtual Communications Express that’s ideal for medium businesses or branch offices, is a reliable and simple-to-deploy alternative to premises-based telephony systems that deliver improved collaboration capabilities for employees, customers, suppliers and partners.
The National Preparedness Community, a website sponsored by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, offers a wide range of resources and information for individuals, businesses and other organizations.
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