6 Tips for Ensuring Your Business Continuity and Resilience this Year and Beyond

Any number of scenarios could bring your business to a screeching halt. Weather destruction, data breaches, and man-made disasters can all severely impact a business to the point that it either can’t go on or takes years to fully recover.

Triada Networks works with NYC and New Jersey investment, asset management, and other financial services firms to ensure their business won’t suffer in the event of any critical outages. With our Triada Recover plan, we put several different business continuity protections in motion that cover multiple bases when it comes to keeping their companies up and running, no matter what.

Just because a business isn’t located in hurricane or tornado prone areas, doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of reasons to formulate a good business continuity plan for anything that can go wrong and cause work interruption.

80% of businesses that experience a failure of some type go under in just over a year.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20% of US businesses experience some type of work-stopping failure in any given year, and 80% of them end up closing their doors a little over a year afterwards.

These failures can be related to:

  • Fire
  • Flood
  • Major power outage
  • Natural disaster
  • Data breach

The reason they can’t recover is that unfortunately, many businesses don’t proactively plan for unexpected disasters until it’s too late and they haven’t put the systems in place to make their company resilient after they occur.

But, if you haven’t planned for a disaster, the good news is that it’s not too late and you can start taking steps right now to ensure business continuity in the future.

How Can I Protect My Company from a Disaster? | Solid Business Continuity Tips

Triada Networks has been offering expert IT services to the financial services industries for over a decade. Through the years we’ve developed methods to ensure technology offers a solid foundation to support our clients and keep them thriving in the face of good times and bad.

We’ve put together six of our best tips you can use to institute a solid business continuity plan.

1. Identify Potential Threats & Scenarios

There’s a card game called “Worse Case Scenario” in which participants are faced with options to ensure their survival in the face of a threat and asked to choose the best one. This is a great idea for companies to do as well when it comes to business continuity.

Any plan should start with identifying potential threats to your business (whether they’re external or internal) and list the worse case scenarios that could happen. Then you can begin identifying ways to address those potential scenarios before they occur.

2. Build a Recovery Team

Does your company have a notification plan in place in the event of physical damage at your offices due to flood, fire, earthquake, or something else? Who’s in charge of carrying it out?

When a disaster strikes, it’s too late to assign who does what to keep your business up and running. Assign a team now that can take charge, lay out a plan, and ensure everyone knows who is doing what if the critical event occurs.

3. Use Cloud-Based Solutions

Cloud-based solutions are intrinsically disaster-proof. They’re designed to store your data on a secure server (or servers) in a location other than your office, and that can be accessed from anywhere on any device with the appropriate login credentials.

For example, if you use Salesforce for client communications combined with a VoIP (internet-based) phone system, if your office power went out, your team could still login to those programs from another location and your business wouldn’t skip a beat.

4. Use Intelligent Business Data Storage

Financial services and asset management firms sometimes get in the habit of storing their sensitive data onsite for security, but that means if there’s a disaster like a fire or even a hardware failure on a backup server, you’ve lost vital records that might not be recoverable.

We provide a secure solution called Triada Recover to our clients which is a collection of critical services that help them avoid data loss and quickly recover if any disaster, large or small, strikes. It’s more than just a cloud-backup, it also provides:

  • Automated assurance
  • Backup testing for viability
  • Continuous protection that stores data as long as needed
  • Fast data recovery (nearly instant)

5. Ongoing Training & Testing

There’s a reason that your school did fire drills when you were a kid, they knew that regular training helped make the response more automatic so if a fire did happen everyone could get out of the building safely.

Employees also need regular training (not just one time) so they know what to do in the event of a work-stopping disaster. Train your employees on your Business Continuity Plan and then hold testing drills regularly. These drills will often help your Disaster Recovery Team identify and fortify any weak links in your plan.

6. Don’t Put it Off

It’s easy to put a business continuity response plan on the back burner when you’re dealing with the natural issues that arise in the course of a day, but this isn’t something you should not put off.

Be proactive and make business continuity a priority today before disaster strikes and you end up as one of those companies in the statistics that can’t ever fully recover.

Need Help with a Strong & Reliable Business Continuity Plan?

You don’t have to ramp up the learning curve yourself when it comes to a strong business continuity plan. Triada Networks can help put the systems in place to keep your business up and running, no matter what disasters may strike in the future.

Give our experts a call today to get started at 201-297-7778 or schedule a free consultation online.