Prepare

Is Your Business Ready?

Those within your community rely on your services pre- and post-disaster. The best thing you can do is prepare yourself, and your clients or customers for the unexpected.

In Case of Emergency

Be prepared with the following measures in order to continue services.

All employees are aware of the emergency response plan.
Have a communications strategy and list of contacts
Have all files and documents backed up to an external hard drive.
Create a stockpile of essential supplies.
Know your organization’s continuity of operations plan.

Develop a Continuity of Operations Plan

Which services can you continue?
Where should you increase your services?
Where to refer your clients?
Who to partner with for assistance?

Steps to Developing a Continuity of Operations Plan

Step 1: Business Impact Analysis

Develop a questionnaire to identify time-sensitive or critical business functions and processes and the resources that support them.
Conduct a workshop to instruct business function and process managers on completing the business impact analysis.
Receive and review questionnaires.
Conduct follow-up interviews to validate the information and fill in any gaps.

Step 2: Recovery Strategies

Identify and document resource requirements based on business impact analysis.
Conduct gap analysis to determine gaps between recovery requirements and current capabilities.
Explore recovery strategy options.
Select recovery strategies with management approval.
Implement strategies.

Step 3: Plan Development

Develop the plan framework.
Organize recovery teams.
Develop Relocation Plans.
Write business continuity and IT disaster recovery procedures
Document manual workarounds
Assemble plan, validate, gain management approval.

Step 4: Testing & Exercises

Develop testing, exercise, and maintenance requirements.
Conduct training for the business continuity team.
Conduct organization exercises.
Conduct testing and document test results.
Update plan to incorporate lessons learned from testing and exercises.