Business continuity is often thought of as a way for the business to continue after a main founder or person leaves the business. However, today we’re going to be talking about a business continuity plan (BCP) as it relates to cybersecurity.
Business Continuity Plan by a Cybersecurity Company in Miami
BCPs are crucial in today’s business world because everything is connected. If a data breach occurs or there’s a disaster, businesses must be ready to adapt rapidly to get back up and running.
Main Goals of a BCP
Most plans have two main goals that must be addressed rapidly to help protect your business:
- Put preventative measures and recovery systems in place
- Ensure operation continuity during the recovery process
If a cyberattack occurs, a BCP will have guidelines and processes to make a recovery as quick and easy as possible. The right BCP is actionable and will allow team members to recover from the attack.
However, you also want your business to remain operational and generate revenue during the recovery process.
Operation continuity will also be addressed in your BCP to allow you to generate revenue while also trying to get your systems back up and running. BCPs are crucial to the health and longevity of every modern business.
5 Steps to a Solid Business Continuity Plan
BCPs can be made any way you want, but in typical businesses, there are five key steps to creating a BCP:
- Impact analysis and risk assessment. An analysis and risk assessment help you appreciate the true damage that a cyberattack can cause. These plans find key areas of risk and identify all threats that currently exist. Team members will identify, analyze, and evaluate all risks to safeguard against them. Finally, if the risk were to become an issue, what would be the impact? This is impact analysis.
- Recovery strategies. Disaster recovery plans must be in place, such as dealing with true natural disasters, power outages or cyberattacks. These plans outline the key steps needed to return to a pre-disaster state.
- Solutions. Multiple solutions may be put in place, depending on the impact analysis. Dozens of options are available, including hot backups, warm backups and cold backups. You may want to consider replication or even cloud-based disaster recovery to manage your business better. If your business deals in virtualization, the solution must address ways to bring your virtualization systems back in order.
- Testing. The testing phase will include testing how the BCP handles a true attack. You would simulate drive or server crashes, deleted files or folders, cyberattacks and more. The goal is to see how your business recovers from these disasters.
- Maintenance. Over time, your BCP must be reviewed and adapted. You may put protocols in place to routinely maintain the BCP to remain relevant to the ever-growing threats businesses face.
Creating a BCP is a critical step in a business’ evolution. Bring all stakeholders together to create a thorough plan that can save you time and revenue in the future.
Do you need help with your business continuity plan? Reach out to FUNCSHUN, a leading cybersecurity company in Miami to begin working on your own BCP today.