Everyone knows that in order to start a business, you must (or at least should) write a business plan.

This document will dictate who is responsible for what, and in what order, in order to get the business to where you want it to be. It describes the whole reason why you are starting your business in the first place, down to contact details for your bank manager (if you have one) and even what you’re going to ask your family to contribute, if you are asking them to stump up the cash.

Now let’s assume that your business is going well; that business plan, despite the advice of your business coach or mentor, doesn’t get another look-in. And that’s probably fine because things are going well.

But what’s this other document that you need to create?

Over the years, your business will have had bits tacked on that you will have forgotten about, but these bits will be important. They’re the things that synchronise your invoices from one place to another, something which updates your contact management system, or maybe a special sequence you have to do in order to get the alarm to stop shouting at the rest of the street for when the junior forgets the alarm code at 3am.

So that’s why I recommend that everyone has a Business Continuity Plan.

Your “Business Continuity Plan”:
that other important business plan

Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) are helpful for a number of reasons:

1. They’re extremely useful for employees to know what their roles and responsibilities are in case of a disaster.
2. They provide a documented process in order to bring things back up to operating standards.
3. You can use them for compliance reasons, to show prospective suppliers and ISO auditors of your operating standards.
4. You can provide them to IT professionals who will be providing solutions for you
5. They can sometimes reduce your insurance costs
6. They can help your team to document your infrastructure properly

And creating the plan is not just a one-off job; as the business organically grows and adapts to changes in the landscape (economy, technology and legislative), your recovery plan should adapt also.

Stratum Now’s solution suite helps businesses recover from every possible type of disaster:

• Lost files… a simple backup & restore operation will help here.
• Server down! Let’s bring up a virtual copy of the last backup of the server that was taken as frequent as fifteen minutes ago.
• Ransomware attacks get stopped in their tracks by blended threat defences.
• Server room and infrastructure destroyed by fire? Let’s bring up the latest copy of the backup, already stored in the cloud, and people can work from that.
• Earthquake destroys the office! Don’t worry… everything’s in the cloud. Just go home and work as normal.
• All of our email is missing from Office 365? Stay calm – we’ve got copies of our cloud solutions too and here’s how to bring them back.

Recovery from disaster is everyone’s business

To see our solution suite and how you can protect your business from any form of disaster, simply and cost-effectively, see our page on Datto solutions.

Stratum Now can help you to not only create your business continuity plan, but to deliver on it, and address any holes you may have when it comes to ensuring that things can be brought back online when they need to be.