When an IT crisis occurs, it’s often already too late to prevent disruption of your business operations. As your business continuity partner, Brightworks IT provides clear, actionable steps to protect your organization’s operations, equipment, and staff. Our IT experts know that the journey to long-term business resiliency and market dominance begins with robust systems in place for business continuity. If you have not yet pinpointed your core tasks, calculated the impact of disruptions, or devised a strategy to maintain critical functions, let us help.
Our business continuity services allow you to:
- Identify the key operations and potential threats to the systems or locations where those operations are carried out
- Get a clear idea of precisely how unexpected events can affect your business
- Keep up with your primary standards for operational consistency (through KPIs, quality assurance, compliance monitoring, etc.)
Why Do IT Failures Occur in Businesses?
No information technology system is without its faults. However, the best-prepared enterprises use business continuity planning to understand where they are the weakest. In our experience, some of the most common issues that contribute to a data loss incident include:
- Human error: Your employees might accidentally erase data or perform an incorrect function. Business continuity and resiliency services can swiftly reset your IT systems and data.
- Application issues: Modern IT infrastructures rely heavily on all kinds of applications. A problem in one can result in issues in others.
- Hardware breakdowns: Despite technological advancements, hardware issues still occur. A single component’s malfunction can disrupt entire IT systems.
- Natural disasters: Unpredictable natural events can devastate IT infrastructures. Without business continuity plans and management, recovering from such events can be difficult. Partnering with Brightworks IT can help you address any system malfunction, enabling quick restoration of business activities.
Step 1: Business Continuity Assessment
Current state assessment (CSA)
The CSA evaluates your existing disaster recovery programs and business processes to see whether or not they are grounded in recognized industry standards (such as financial industry regulatory authority compliance standards). It delivers a detailed report on your programs’ present level of development and recovery capacity. After completing the CSA, the Brightworks IT team offers advanced recommendations to enhance the development of your recovery strategies. For both new and existing programs, the CSA serves as an ideal starting point to establish a foundation for development and to map out a path for future advancements.
Threat & risk assessment (TRA)
A TRA evaluates the human-made, technological, and natural threats that could negatively impact your key business and IT operations. This assessment considers the probability and potential consequences of each threat, along with the current level of threat reduction. You will receive an exhaustive account outlining not only the critical risk and exposure areas but also suggestions for improvements.
Business impact analysis (BIA)
Our BIA focuses on the essential first step of matching business needs with IT recovery abilities. This process involves a thorough examination of various recovery strategy options for critical business functions. We categorize the business operations and IT elements vital to your organization’s survival by measuring both the tangible and intangible effects of operational downtime. The analysis also sets specific targets for your organization’s Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).
Step 2: Developing Your Business Continuity Plan
While many organizations have plans in place for IT recovery, most of these plans do not give enough attention to maintaining business process continuity. What this means is that while they are prepared to restore their IT systems and data in case of a failure, they often don’t have a strategy to continue or resume their most important operations during and after an IT crisis.
Our teams focus on creating business continuity plans to keep your core functions like customer service, order processing, or production running, even when the IT ecosystem has been compromised.
We develop disaster recovery solutions and strategies that are theoretical but effectively tackle the real-world consequences of system outages on your business activities. This process begins with conducting a Business Impact Analysis, where we identify the potential effects of disruptions on your business. Based on this, our managed IT services build a recovery plan that is thoroughly vetted and tested. Our job here is to diminish risks that stem from a variety of sources — be it business-related, environmental, technological, or resulting from human actions.
Incorporating a well-defined risk management plan as part of your business continuity program also cuts down on the costs linked to meeting compliance requirements. More importantly, it enhances the effectiveness of your recovery efforts, which means you can bounce back faster, saving both time and money.
Step 3: Executing Your Business Continuity and Management Strategy
We supervise regular exercises to check if your plans can meet your established Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). Part of our service includes running drills and simulations to test your recovery and emergency procedures, followed by targeted recommendations.
To gauge the readiness of your crisis management team — whether they can handle and rebound from unexpected events in real life — we conduct mock disaster drills. Our method involves both top management and department heads, steering the company from the onset of an incident through to a successful recovery.
Schedule a Consultation with Our Business Continuity Services Team
Breakdowns in an organization’s IT infrastructure, whether it is the computer networks or physical facilities, can cause significant disruptions to its operations. To understand the gravity of such disruptions, consider the financial implications. Gartner estimates that the average cost of network downtime is approximately $5,600 per minute.
These costs can come in the form of lost sales opportunities, decreased productivity as employees are unable to complete their tasks, potential penalties for failing to meet contractual obligations, and damage to the company’s reputation — which can have long-term impacts.
Planning for operational resiliency is not a one-and-done type of task. It requires regular updates and maintenance to stay relevant to your business’s evolving needs and objectives. Brightworks IT’s business continuity management software gives you a series of steps and deliverables, each feeding into the next, fostering a cycle of continuous improvement.Call (844) 333-2948 or reach out to Brightworks IT and let’s build a dynamic business continuity plan for your current and future business protection needs.