How COVID-19 Confirmed the Importance of a Business Continuity Plan

Business owners didn’t see the global health pandemic coming, just like most of the rest of the population. People were sceptical in the early days of COVID-19, and most of them didn’t realize the importance of a business continuity plan until they were forced to pivot their operations to work remotely, unless they were an essential business.

The positive thing about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it forced employees and business owners to quickly adapt their business operations to mitigate the damage and exposed weak links in their business planning.

Business Operations

While most businesses had to transition to a remote working reality, the difference between businesses that had a business continuity plan in place and the ones that didn’t was enormous. For the first group, that transition was successfully done within a short timeframe, while the second group needed to invest heavily and were hit with big delays and downtime.

A proper business continuity plan should help you plan for disasters like this by leveraging smarter and more flexible business tools and data management in order to quickly transition in a case like the COVID-19 pandemic, or quickly get back to “normal” in a case of a damaging disaster like a fire at the office, for example.

Define your priorities

Depending on your industry and your particular business needs, you should determine what are the key priorities to ensure that your business will be able to continue servicing your customers in the quickest and smoothest possible way.

For example, an e-commerce or online-based business might want its website, online systems, and client-focused staff to be back at a 100% as quickly as possible in the first place, and then ensure that the rest of the business operations and departments follow. On the other side of the spectrum, a professional services, operation like a law firm or accounting firm, will want its most profitable professionals to be fully operational first, and then the rest of its team.

Most businesses have different needs and defining your priorities and the related processes and tools properly will make or break your business continuity plan.

Partnerships

Partnerships can add tremendous value to the planning and execution of a business continuity plan.

A good IT partner can help you plan and adapt your tools, your security, your data management and put together a customized process for your business. You can also profit from their knowledge of current and past clients to have better planning, tips, dos and don’ts. After all, in today’s day and age, most businesses are depending heavily on IT to run their operations, which is why you want to pick a partner that can meet your unique requirements.

Other partnerships are also important to consider, from a backup warehouse to outsourcing possibilities in some cases, you don’t want to overlook the importance of covering all your operations needs by thinking that it won’t happen – It just did.

Conclusion

By this time, we all know that the COVID-19 pandemic confirmed the importance of proper business planning and ensuring business continuity under different disaster possibilities. If you need help on the IT side of things, our MicroAge locations across the country can help you put together a customized plan that will help your business navigate through potential disasters, minimize your down-time and maximize your business operations.