360 Helps Managed Security Firm With Business Continuity Planning

Managed Security Firm Goes To 360 Smart Networks For Their Business Continuity Planning

Recently, we had a large managed security firm reach out to us about helping them create a business continuity plan. If we, as a society, have learned anything over the past few months, it’s this: you can’t predict when a disaster will happen. We hear so often about planning for power outages, storms, and other natural disasters that result in a short-term disruption, but every now and then, something happens that disrupts an organization for weeks, or worse, months. The coronavirus pandemic is the perfect example.

For many organizations, their business continuity plans (if they had one in place) simply didn’t account for such a large-scale state of emergency that would require employees to work from home for months. Our team often gets called in when businesses realize they’re not prepared for a disaster – after it’s too late. Then, it’s a long, comprehensive restoration process that’s rather expensive, and more often than not, doesn’t fully restore ALL systems and data.

Why Does Every Business Need A Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan is essential to ensuring you can continue operating, even if an outage or disaster happens that impacts the following:

• Your people
• Your systems
• Your office

Basically, a business continuity plan helps you mitigate risks and avoid disruption resulting from any sort of event beyond your control. It deals with the safety and restoration of your locations, personnel, and operational procedures before, during, and after a disruption of some sort.

If you’re still not sold on the idea of a business continuity plan, imagine this… You go into the office and turn on your computer – only to find all of your critical data and applications aren’t accessible.

Why?

Because a hacker managed to install ransomware on your system, and in turn, it’s spread throughout the network, nobody can access anything they need to get work done.

What do you do next? How much does an hour, or worse, an entire day of being unable to work cost you? For most businesses, the cost of downtime is far too high – much higher than the cost of preparing for a disruption would be. Many organizations never reopen after a major disaster.

What Should A Business Continuity Plan Include?

We focus heavily on business continuity planning with our clients because we want them to stay operational – no matter what happens. Our business continuity planning starts with identifying the following:

• Your Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs): We determine how long you’re able to go without access to a specific application or system.
• Your Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs): We determine how much data you can afford to lose in the event of an outage/how often data should be backed up.
• Your Compliance Service Level Agreements (SLAs): We determine what, if any, stipulations may exist in regards to using the cloud to maintain operations.

Basically, the goal is to determine your most vital systems and processes, as well as the effect an outage would have. Next, we work on creating a business continuity plan according to the following steps:

1. Create backups of data, systems, and applications to ensure all resources are backed up and ready to recover when you need them most.
2. Implement redundancies that are available when you need them such as a generator, backup internet connection, and more.
3. Document important emergency tasks such as data recovery, crisis communications, and more – ensuring all staff members are aware of their individual part in recovery.
4. Implement alternative methods for communication in case the internet or phone network goes down, such as a VoIP system that works in the cloud.
5. Perform recovery drills on a regular basis to ensure resources can be restored in the event of a disaster and make sure everyone is well-versed in the process.
6. Evaluate your performance after recovery drills to review what’s working well, what’s not working well, and overall, areas for improvement.

A Business Continuity Plan Should Prepare You For Remote Work…

Lastly, a business continuity plan should prepare you for remote work. This means you should be prepared with work from home solutions, including:

• Business-grade laptops
• Routers
• High-speed internet packages
• VPNs
• Business-grade antivirus software and firewalls
• Cloud-based solutions, including hosted desktops, phones, applications, and more

Why Trust 360 Smart Networks For Business Continuity Planning?

As we mentioned above, many organizations, including a managed security firm, reach out to us for help with business continuity planning. This is because we’re well known in the industry for having an extensive, flexible range of capabilities amongst our team. We have products and services designed to provide the ultimate functionality in terms of performance, security, and above all, business continuity.

If you’re ready to feel confident about your ability to recover from a disaster (and never risk having to close your doors for good), then get in touch with us…

Click here to get started or call us at (770) 518-7087.