Preparing for major disasters is common in business continuity planning, but it can be easy to overlook minor crises at the same time, opening your company up to risks all the same.
There are a broad number of minor incidents that can affect business operations, from an internet outage to a hardware failure. Preparing for natural disasters, such as a hurricane or tornado, can be easy comparatively, due to the widespread media coverage and scale of these problems. When a major crisis strikes, businesses often have to evacuate, set up operations at a hot site or have employees work remotely through cloud-based or similar systems. This makes setting up a broad continuity of operations plan simple in some regards.
However, when a crisis is isolated to a single department or system, the effect can be just as devastating in the long run, as a business could be under prepared for the incident. When hardware breaks down or a system goes dark for one reason or another, a business might not be able to quickly migrate applications to a new host or recover the relevant data in a timely manner. Relying on simply getting the system back up and running quickly doesn't work either, because the severity of the issue cannot be anticipated.
By remembering to include smaller problems in disaster recover plans, companies can minimize the risks to their operations and focus on overall success rate of their strategies. Ultimately, no plan can take every possible scenario into consideration, but expanding your continuity strategy on a regular basis is important and can help incorporate new threats and boost continuity and disaster protection over time.