Redwood Analytics

Planning is an oft-referenced theme on this blog.  Plan for increasing wealth, plan for economic down cycles, plan for disasters.  What about during interruptions such as the recent blackberry outage?

There are many things that can cause business interruptions.  Planning for them will mitigate the consequences those interruptions have on your firm's operations.  Not planning for them will cost you money.

What are some things you can do to prepare?  There are companies that make a living selling plans to businesses, but basic guidelines include:

• Business Impact Analysis:  Determine the effect an outage would have on the  firm's most crucial systems and processes. More or less identifying the important processes subject to interruption and how that interruption will affect business.  In a law firm, this includes (but is not limited to) telephone systems, computers, staff, software systems.  
• Plan what you will do if business interruption takes place:  This, of course, is the hard part.  Planning means taking the time to think of ways around the interruption - and gain approval for the procedure.  For example, if your office is unavailable, where are critical staff?  They need to have a place to meet to put in effect the plan.  Remote communication is easier now than it's ever been.  Cell phones help but what about email?  If your email servers go down, you will need a backup plan to send and receive communications.  There are services such as Mimecast Unified Email Messaging that can provide a seamless transition that clients won't notice - making it appear as if there were no interruption at all - so long as you have access to high speed internet or have a data-enabled mobile device.  In the case of an interruption of internet access, there needs to be a secondary plan to know where your people are.
• Always have good, redundant, and off-site backups available:  All the benefits of technology are in vain in a disaster situation if you have no backups.  It has been reported that 25% to 30% of backups don't save properly.  When was the last time your office checked to make sure the backups were working?   Services such as LexisNexis Data Backup and Protection Services provide continuous automatic off-site storage of your data.
• Run a drill or two to test the processes: It is paradoxical to interrupt the business day to test processes geared to mitigate interruptions in the business day.  But it has to be done.  Otherwise you may not find the flaws in the plan until you put the plan in action - not the time you want to find out that you left out an important facet.
• Review the plan annually:  Don't just dust off the Y2K disaster readiness plan and change the cover page.  Times change, technologies change, and needs change.  Make sure you are up to date on all your systems and their effect on your business.

A sample business continuity and disaster preparedness plan, courtesy of ready.gov, can be downloaded by clicking here.

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