6 Mistakes That Can Affect Your Business Continuity

Whilst most companies may assume that their operations are efficient and failproof, there’s always room for improvement. 

Obstacles, especially in the IT environment, can arise anytime but your organisation can recover these efficiently depending on what solutions are available. This makes having a good business continuity plan important. 

With our reliance on technology in some capacity, every organisation needs to have the right measures to deal with unplanned interruptions. If you’re looking to improve business continuity, proper business continuity management is essential.

In this article, we’ve curated a list of common IT business continuity mistakes that could potentially harm your business operations. By recognising and avoiding these mistakes, you can swiftly recover from any business interruptions.

Let’s take a look.

1. Underestimating the Scale of Disaster

Power outages, storms and other disasters can happen at any time and affect large areas of the town or city. This makes it crucial to have your recovery site at a distance from your organisation so that it remains unaffected by the disasters.

Many people tend to underestimate the scale and impact a disaster can have when there is poor business continuity management. By having the server and backup in the same area, you risk losing the stored data which can then hamper the company’s operations.

Even with a cloud backup, some data is stored in a physical location which makes it essential to have the data centre in a different location. Irrespective of how well-planned you may think your business may be, underestimating a disaster is one of the business continuity mistakes that you need to avoid. 

2. Not Explaining the Business Continuity Plan to Your Staff

Employees are crucial for the efficacy of a business continuity plan and not explaining the details of the plan or lack of awareness about what is included can work against you.

One of the biggest business continuity mistakes organisations make is not making their employees well-versed with the formulated plan. A lack of knowledge about the business continuity plan may cause confusion about how they should respond during a crisis. Since there’s not enough understanding of what areas are covered, this may lead to your employees making mistakes.

From how to handle the clients when the servers are down to explaining what schedules will come into effect when disaster strikes, they should be aware of what they need to do to ensure the operations are back up and running in no time.

3. Not Testing the Plan and Skipping Risk Assessment

Another point to add to your list of business continuity mistakes to avoid is to skip testing the plan and risk assessment. Since a business continuity plan isn’t like an insurance policy that needs to be claimed after a disaster strikes, make sure it’s effective through regular testing.

By testing the plan, you get insights into what works or if any issues need to be taken into account and improved on. A robust plan must address a multitude of scenarios, especially since there’s no guarantee that there will be people present when the disaster strikes.

A risk assessment test helps identify risks and problem areas that need to be focused on. Ideally, a risk assessment should be conducted before finalising the business continuity plan to ensure all important areas of your organisation are covered.

4. Not Reviewing the Plan Regularly

Businesses are evolving continually which means that your current business continuity plan may already be outdated. To make it relevant to your business’ growth, it needs to be reviewed and updated regularly.

While you may decide on a period to review the plan, not identifying the red flags that indicate something is amiss is one of the business continuity mistakes you need to handle immediately.

Whether you have a dedicated IT partner like Redpalm or your own IT organisation in charge of business continuity, changing the plan according to the current structure and operations of the company is a responsibility that must not be neglected.

5. Too Much Focus on Infrastructure

Many businesses that manage and handle large amounts of data are often concerned about data loss. One of the biggest business continuity mistakes involves businesses focusing solely on protecting critical business infrastructure in their strategies and business continuity plans. 

While focusing on infrastructure, such as hardware, software, and IT systems is essential, they’re not all you need to be concerned about.

Since data loss could potentially damage your business reputation, it’s important to prioritise this factor during business continuity management. However, you also need to give enough attention to sales operations and customer satisfaction, especially if you want to continue operating. 

6. Failing to Back Up Critical Data

Data loss can be a devastating blow to any organisation when dealing with cyber-attacks or any disruptive events. You need to prioritise data backups to avoid damaging your business reputation and effectively resume operations once any disaster passes. 

Many IT tools and software are available to create backups of essential business data. Use these tools to protect your business assets, especially when managing or storing customer data. If you do not back up your important data, you may experience not only a revenue loss but also potential legal consequences if customer data is compromised. 

Additionally, it’s a good idea to have a backup for IT assets for your business to avoid any business continuity errors. Choose a secure off-site location for your data to avoid losing it and make a swift recovery during any IT disasters.

Data loss can disrupt the functioning of any organisation in many different ways. That’s why, one of the business continuity mistakes you need to avoid is failing to make data backups of critical data. 

Contact Redpalm To Avoid Business Continuity Mistakes

Business continuity management may appear daunting at first. However, it’s essential to help you continue serving your customers regardless of external conditions. 

Knowing which business continuity mistakes to avoid will help you reduce business continuity errors and effectively handle any disaster scenario with confidence. 

If you’ve identified weak areas in your current business continuity plan or simply wish to make your existing plan more robust, Redpalm can help you with that.

Redpalm is an MSP that empowers your organisation with the latest cybersecurity solutions and professional IT support. 

With our business continuity and disaster recovery solutions, we can help businesses develop a better IT environment with better security and have backups and other measures in place to prevent losses in the event of a disaster.

We also offer services like technology procurement, incident response, vulnerability assessments, IT audits and health checks, and so much more.

To learn more about our services, click here or contact us to schedule an appointment today!