Maintaining Continuity is Key to Getting Through Tough Spots

When you get right down to it, your business is probably vulnerable to cyberattacks, no matter how prepared you are. There are countless ways you can improve your operations, but if you don’t take steps now to safeguard your company’s infrastructure, you could risk facing an even greater threat to your business’ future: a cybersecurity breach. There are simple steps that can be taken to help ensure your organization isn’t sunk by a random security breach.

Put Together a List of Emergency Contacts

This seemingly simple step is something that you probably already have, but you need to keep it up-to-date, too and ensure that it contains all the information your company needs about your staff and other contacts in case there is a serious disruption to your operations.

A disruption can be defined as anything that causes your operations to be interrupted in some way. Let’s look at an example.

If you were unable to access your systems, such as your business apps, your email, your contacts, and documents on your server, that would be a major disruption. Let’s imagine that this issue is caused by a threat that locks you and your staff out of your critical business systems for a couple of days.

While we want businesses to be ready to handle this issue or, better yet, prevent it entirely, you’ll want to be prepared just in case. Having this contact list together will be critical to keeping your lines of communication open to relay information about your circumstances to business stakeholders.

To get started, just open up a Word document and list the names and personal phone numbers for each of your employees, starting with management. Make a note for what type of phone number it is, be it a cell number or a home phone number.

Next, you should list your emergency contact information, including the local fire department, police, 911, and so on. Also be sure to include your insurance contact information, your alarm company, and other vendors that might need to be contacted. While you’re at it, you can add SCW to the list in the event you need us to help with your technology-related issues.

Finally, you’ll want to add your biggest and most important clients to the list so they can be contacted should the need arise. A little transparency about disruptions to their service can go a long way toward understanding.

Trust us when we say this list will make you feel a lot better when your network is suddenly unavailable and nobody knows what to do about it.

Business Continuity Is Not “Set it and Forget It”

You should be routinely testing your business continuity plan so that you can ensure it always works when you need it to, and remember that communication is critical to keep your team and customers knowledgeable about the challenges your organization is facing.

SCW believes that businesses can take many steps to prepare for such emergencies, and it all starts with a data backup and disaster recovery service. We can assist you with implementing such a policy for your organization to ensure that problems don’t disrupt your operations.

For more information, contact us at (509) 534-1530.