GUIDELINES FOR MAINTAINING BUSINESS CONTINUITY FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION

The Importance of Business Continuity - and the Challenges it Poses 

Whether planned or unplanned, business disruptions that aren’t managed effectively come at a high cost. Lost revenue, missed sales opportunities, and broken service level agreements can have a devastating financial impact. Disrupted partner relationships and supply chains can delay time-to-market, derail important initiatives, and weaken competitive advantage. An inadequate response can harm the company’s public image, as well as the confidence of its customers and investors. Following the disruption, people can find it difficult to regain full productivity due to lost data, interrupted work in progress, and lost collaborative cohesion with teammates and management—not to mention the personal impact the event may have had on them.

For IT, recovering from a business disruption can be a complex and timeconsuming process:

• Bringing the systems back online and restoring any lost data
• Replacing lost or inaccessible devices and ensuring that each can run the
  user’s required software
• Provisioning and configuring applications
• Designing new ways of working and communicating them to users, from
  alternate network access methods to workarounds for applications which
  can no longer be accessed
• Accomplishing all of these tasks in the middle of an emergency

Here is a comprehensive white paper that can guide your business continuity approach.