Staying Operational During Natural Disasters and the Coronavirus Outbreak: How to Develop a Business Continuity Plan
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This week, in the Nashville area and elsewhere, the COVID-19 Coronavirus situation has become much more serious. With more schools closing and event cancellations by the day, it’s becoming clear that every organization needs to develop a plan to deal with the threat of infection both internally and in the ways they interface with the public.
For businesses that want to respond appropriately to protect both employees and customers from risk of infection, a large component of that planning should involve a business continuity plan that empowers workers to utilize technology in a secure manner to remain productive when working away from the office.
Not sure where to start? Here are a few key items to consider when developing your business continuity plan:
Remote access solutions that let your team work from home with access to data, applications, and systems: The trick to collaborating outside the office while maintaining the security of your data is providing secure access to the data your employees and customers need in a centralized location. There are a number of business-grade file sync and share services on the market that facilitate centralized, managed storage of data. And cloud hosting services are now making it practical for many businesses to host their entire server infrastructure in the cloud, providing more possibilities for remote access.
Communication solutions that enable anytime, anywhere communication via the internet from any device or location: Communication—both internally and with customers—is a key component in business operations. Thankfully, there are a number of solutions that enable chat, audio, and video conferencing for your workforce. These are important investments to make to ensure that the collaboration that fuels your work can continue when employees are not able to work from the office.
Cybersecurity solutions that keep you safe against cybercriminals leveraging this major headline as a mechanism of social engineering: Cybercriminals prey on individuals’ natural reactions of fear and their desire to help during a crisis. It’s important, then, to invest in safeguards—from anti-spam and anti-malware tools to automated cybersecurity training solutions—to both prevent scams from reaching your employees and arm them with the awareness to combat them.
Emergency procedures that outline how to recover equipment, emergency contact information for employees, and more: In general, a disaster recovery plan—which defines the systems and data that are crucial to business processes and define processes and systems for recovering them—necessarily informs a business continuity plan by ensuring that the necessary parties know what needs to be done to restore any lost access to data. Having these plans documented and reviewed regularly ensures that, in a crisis, panic is reduced, and appropriate access is restored as quickly as possible.
Virtual private network (VPN) technology to ensure your employees are using a secure, encrypted connection at home to access corporate information: When employees work from home, they are accessing the internet from connections that you do not control. Thus, unless you have solutions like a VPN in place, they could be putting your data at risk for a breach.
While it’s always best practice to review your business continuity plans with a technology expert to ensure that the particularities of your operations are covered, these tips can get you started on the right path toward enabling your operations to survive an emergency like the COVID-19 outbreak. Thankfully, we live in times where technology empowers workers to be productive from home—provided that the right solutions and planning are in place.
