Why You Need A Business Continuity Plan
Altogether avoiding significant risks, such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, theft, flooding, or building fires is not possible in today’s world, even for the most prudent businesses. These types of potentially catastrophic events can disrupt business significantly, sometimes for long periods of time.
Lost revenue, and the added expenses of recovering from the disaster itself can cut into profits and potentially drive businesses to bankruptcy. A recent article published by Business News Daily said that over 70% of American workers polled do not feel well prepared for a disaster. Employee safety and company revenue needs to be looked out for well before disaster strikes.
Being prepared is crucial to businesses survival. The effects of catastrophic events can be largely diminished if your company has a business continuity plan.
The Importance of Business Continuity Plan Preparation
Effectively overcoming and moving beyond disasters is not so much dependent on what companies do in the moment to respond, but rather, how well they implement the disaster recovery plan they’ve created prior to the disaster.
The best chance companies have of overcoming substantial challenges is to be prepared for them, lessening the scope of the adversity and allowing business operations to continue as normal as soon as possible.
When the time to react has come, the time to prepare is over, and it will be too late for company leaders to do things like identify, analyze, and defend critical assets. In today’s world, one of the most important assets to any organization is its information.
Creating a Business Continuity Plan
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
When you conduct a business impact analysis, you seek to identify the effects, consequences, and fallout of disasters on critical business assets and operations. In the stage you may look at things like: lost revenue and income, increased expenses, possibly regulatory fines, diminished reputation and customer satisfaction.
Identify Critical Processes
Here you can identify what functions are most crucial and make a plan on how to keep them running in the event of a disaster.
Organize a Recovery Team
Having a designated team who understands their roles during a disaster can help avoid confusion and provide direction to others.
The Importance of Practice
The only way to know if your business continuity plan is any good at protecting company assets is to practice it. Occasional run-throughs will help ensure that if the plan ever needs to be implemented, key personnel will have the confidence and experience to do so with just a few moments notice. You can also use the exercise results to evaluate the effectiveness of the plan and make needed improvements.
Implement a Paperless Office: Quicker Recovery through Backed up Data
One of the most important preparations your business can make to become resilient against any kind of disaster is to use a paperless document filing system. Even during and shortly after a catastrophic event, such as total building loss, business can continue and return to normal very quickly with a paperless document management system.
eFileCabinet Customer Success Stories
In February, 2006, Fosselman & Associates, eFileCabinet customers, suffered a total building loss due to fire. They were able to go back to work the next day by noon in a rented building with 10 years of tax returns and critical documents intact and in hand.
In 2007, a deadly tornado wiped out 95% of Greensboro, Kansas. Randy Kelly, CPA, was open for business the very next day with a makeshift desk and computer in the flattened remains of his building.
A Paperless Business Continuity Plan
eFileCabinet’s paperless document management helps businesses become more resilient by providing frequent backups to the Cloud, meaning that even if your physical building is gone, your information is safe.
Paperless storage helps guard against physical losses of information by backing up files in multiple secure locations. Paperless storage also helps enhance the security of documents against possible theft, mishandling, or cyber attack. All of the information stored with eFileCabinet is protected with 256-bit encryption.
256-bit encryption is extremely secure, about 2,000 times more secure than the standard 128-bit encryption, which many banking websites use. We also use SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption, a security protocol which protects confidential information sent between a web client and a server.
eFileCabinet’s data centers are SAS (statement on auditing standards) 70 Type II certified, meaning that our network infrastructure and security has met rigorous safety and security standards. eFileCabinets commitment to data security also makes it very easy for users of our products to meet industry compliance standards set by organizations like HIPAA and the SEC.
To see how eFileCabinet can help your business or organization become more resilient in the event of a disaster, fill out the form on this page for a trial offer.