When Your Office Goes Offline: Creating a Business Continuity Plan

It happens to every company at some point: normal business operations are disrupted. While ransomware attacks and other cyber incidents make headlines, many business disruptions begin with more familiar events—an extended power outage, severe weather, a fire or another localized emergency.

Businesses today face a wide range of potential disruptions. PwC describes this environment of ongoing uncertainty as an “era of permacrisis,” where events affecting supply chains, technology systems, facilities or employees can create broader operational challenges.

Regardless of the cause, when the office goes offline temporarily, critical work can’t simply stop. Having a practical disruption plan in place will allow the organization to maintain business continuity during any sort of crisis.

Key Business Continuity Strategies

Because few organizations can afford an extended interruption, creating a business continuity plan is an important first step. A complete preparedness strategy should also address disaster recovery and operational resilience.

An effective business continuity plan is a written set of processes—preferably shared across the leadership—that has well-defined procedures for any type of disruption. A strong continuity strategy should account for a range of disruptions, from severe weather and power outages to supply chain interruptions and public health emergencies.

While a business continuity plan outlines how an organization will maintain critical operations during a disruption, a disaster recovery plan focuses on restoring affected technology, systems and data. Disaster recovery is essential following a cyber incident, but also supports recovery from equipment failures, outages and physical damage.  

Operational resilience brings these continuity strategies together by adding the human component to the key processes and technology needed to support critical operations. Leadership must ensure employees have the tools, access, guidance and support they need while recognizing that some functions may operate at reduced capacity.

6 Ways to Prepare for the Unexpected

When offices go offline, it isn’t just lights and internet that go dark. Employees can lose physical access to the workplace, while remote workers may lose connectivity to essential services or systems. In other cases, the disruption may occur elsewhere, affecting data centers, vendors, utilities or supply chains. A sound business continuity plan should account for these scenarios and help keep critical operations functioning outside the organization’s normal work environment.

Here are six steps to help prepare for a disruption:

• Identify critical business functions needed to keep the business running, even at minimal levels. Once identified, senior management can define essential staffing, what network, software applications and data permissions and sources are necessary and what equipment is needed. Be prepared to work with a skeleton team if the incident creates widespread damage and impacts employee well-being.
• Conduct a business impact analysis to understand how downtime could affect revenue, customers, compliance obligations and other business priorities over time. Use those findings to establish a recovery time objective (RTO)—the target amount of time within which each critical function or system should be restored following a disruption. This helps leaders prioritize what needs to come back online first.
• Plan ahead for when key employees need to work offsite. When creating contingency plans, include rerouting phone calls to different numbers or setting up remote out-of-office messages, VPN access, access to backup data and MFA methods that can be used off-network.
• Depending on the type of incident, connectivity may be unavailable to employees at home as well as in the office. The continuity plan should provide a strategy for hotspot connections and battery backups.
• Create and regularly test a communication plan. Employees should understand their responsibilities in the response strategy, how they will receive updates and what triggers the plan’s activation. Periodic exercises can uncover outdated contacts, access problems and unclear procedures before an actual emergency
• Work with vendors and other third-party business partners who can assist in keeping operations running or can pause services temporarily.

No organization can prevent every disruption, but you can prepare to keep critical work moving. Creating a business continuity plan gives employees clear priorities, communication procedures and access to the tools they need when the usual work environment is unavailable.

Whether an interruption lasts a few hours or several weeks, the right planning can reduce confusion and limit downtime. Fairdinkum can help evaluate whether your technology, recovery procedures and remote-work capabilities are ready to support you when the unexpected happens.