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DownloadEnsure that your business continues to thrive under unfavorable conditions with our Business Continuity Frameworks deck. This presentation includes practical frameworks to help you perform better impact assessment, Risk Management, prevention and recovery strategies and protect your company.
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DownloadOne of the first steps in planning for business continuity is identifying potential threats. Use this slide to list them all. The threats may include: data loss, cyberattacks, malware and viruses, network and internet disruptions and others.
With this slide, communicate your plan for business resilience. Some of the key items to include here are: business impact analysis, essential functions, vital records and resources plan, risk assessment and management plan.
Using this slide, deliver the analysis of your business' continuity management lifecycle, which includes the evaluation of program management, determining the business continuity plan (BCP) and embedding it in the organization's culture.
Business continuity planning is the process of developing systems to prevent potential risks and recover from a threat. One of the main goals of the planning is to establish continuing operations prior to and while implementing the execution of disaster recovery.
Wayne Elsey, Founder and Head Coach and CEO at The Funds2Orgs Group, in his article for "Forbes Business Development Council," recommends taking these three vital steps when planning for business continuity:
According to Elsey, during the risk-assessment phase, it's essential to pinpoint and understand all the exposure risks for your venture. "By doing a business impact analysis (BIA), you can gain clarity about every potential threat to your business. The BIA will provide you with critical information, such as who your stakeholders are, your supply chain gaps, and your levels of resilience. It will also inform you about the core team that you should keep in place in the face of potential catastrophe," he writes.
Once BIA and any gap analyses are ready, create your business continuity plan. "Initially, the team should create a draft document, and then they can present it to the senior executives who have to sign off on it," Elsey says. When it comes to a business continuity plan, no area of your business should be ignored. According to Elsey: "Consideration and review should move through the entire company, including every division and into each department, role and function."
It is important that your business continuation plan is reviewed and evaluated regularly. "I can't emphasize this enough – preparation is critical, and at moments like the present, planning is happening daily. Ultimately, it's all about coming out on top. Building relationships, having strategic discussions and developing clear messaging are key. It's also important to reframe and refocus your operations, marketing and sales strategy to fuel your revenue generation and cash flow during difficult times. For more information about business continuity planning, you can visit the Small Business Administration website or even SCORE's small business disaster preparedness resources," Elsey writes.
According to business continuity services provider, Invenio IT, the March 2018 SamSam ransomware attack on the City of Atlanta devastated the city government's computer systems and disrupted numerous city services, police records, courts, utilities and parking services included.
Computer systems were down for five days, which required various city departments to complete important paperwork by hand. The complete recovery took several months, Invenio IT reports.
The attackers' demand was a $52,000 ransom payment, but the financial damages didn't end there – the recovery resulted in over $17 million losses (almost $3 million alone was spent on contracts for emergency IT consultants and crisis management firms).
The Atlanta ransomware attack is a bitter lesson in inadequate business continuity planning, Invenio IT states, as it uncovered the fact that the city's IT was completely unprepared for the disaster. According to "StateScoop," two months prior to the attack, an audit found 1,500 to 2,000 vulnerabilities in the city's IT systems, which were compounded by "obsolete software and an IT culture driven by 'ad hoc or undocumented' processes."
Questions and answers
Experts from Invenio IT speculate that weak passwords were the main vulnerability that allowed for the attack to happen in the first place. "That is a common entry point for SamSam attackers, who use brute-force software to guess thousands of password combinations in a matter of seconds. Frankly, it's an unsophisticated method that could have been prevented with stronger password management protocols," the experts say.
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