As part of Business Continuity Awareness Week starting on May 13, Digital Journal talked to Dan Johnson, Ensono director of global business continuity and disaster recovery, for business continuity best practices and common mistakes.
Here are some of Johnson’s tips:
- Mistake: scenario-based planning. Johnson advises thinking of short-term and long-term disasters when planning to ensure the company’s resilience. “Businesses should ensure their BCPs are written for recovery, not specific disasters,” he says.
- Mistake: viewing disaster recovery plans as optional. Johnson sees business that see disaster recovery as similar to extra insurance — an add-on that isn’t really needed for healthy businesses. “Having a single point of failure with no resiliency and no plan is a recipe for disaster,” he says.
- Best practice: start with a business impact analysis (BIA). Johnson advises using the BIA to determine how the various people, process and other elements of the company would be affected by disaster. This step should take place before developing a business continuity pan.
- Best practice: don’t stop with the business continuity plan. Johnson advises developing a technical recovery plan (or plans) for IT assets including recovery strategies. He also says a crisis management plan should be in place to lay out the process of company response.
- Best practice: test regularly. Johnson recommends tabletop or walkthrough exercises to test procedures and plans.
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