As we discussed briefly in our blog about steps toward building your business continuity strategy, understanding the many potential risks that can disrupt or derail business operations is essential. We don't mean just cybersecurity risks – although those get the most attention by far. Your organization should consider natural disasters, hardware failures, internet or power outages, and even the chance an employee could go rogue.
Sounds easy enough, right? Many organizations fall victim to three mistakes when they try to tackle business continuity: missing key threats, only considering full shutdowns as "disruption," and crafting a generic mitigation plan that doesn't address vastly different scenarios.
Identifying Potential Threats to Your Business Operations
The biggest challenge for most organizations is attempting to identify threats to the company but not thinking broadly enough about risk. Here are some potential causes for business disruption – both common and uncommon – you should consider when starting your business risk assessment:
- Natural Disasters: Events such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires can damage infrastructure, disrupt supply chains, and halt operations.
- Technological Failures: System outages, cyberattacks, or failures in IT infrastructure can interrupt business operations and compromise data security.
- Supply Chain Issues: Problems with suppliers, such as delays, quality issues, or geopolitical tensions, can affect the availability of critical materials and products.
- Pandemics and Health Crises: Global health emergencies, like the COVID-19 pandemic, can lead to operational shutdowns, changes in consumer behavior, and disruptions in global trade.
- Human Factors: Strikes, labor disputes, or key employee departures can impact productivity and business continuity.
- Political Instability: Political unrest, conflicts, or changes in government policies can impact business environments and operations.
- Legal Issues: Lawsuits, intellectual property disputes, or compliance issues can lead to financial penalties and operational disruptions.
- Cybersecurity: Cyber attack prevention should be a mainstay of your risk assessment process, but even within this category, the scenarios run the gauntlet.
Before your organization can prepare for and mitigate these threats with a robust risk management and business continuity strategy, you must consider how these events, however unlikely, could impact your organization. Sure, civil unrest is unlikely in the United States, but if you do business with other countries, or perhaps source equipment from overseas, you have to consider the impact of that type of threat. As many businesses learned during COVID, your business operations can be running smoothly but if your entire workforce is suddenly out ill, you have a problem that is not easily solved.
To create a reliable framework around threat categories and the risk faced by your businesses, consider factors such as severity, frequency, and existing controls in place to manage them effectively as a first step. By mapping out the myriad threats, your organization can better safeguard your business.
Don't Limit Disruption to "Closed"
The second common misstep that organizations make is only planning for massive disruption – a hurricane wipes out your headquarters, a cyber attack locks down data, or an employee steals your customer database. But often, disruption is a week without power or a failed server that puts business operations on hold until new hardware is installed. By overlooking the vastly varied impact of risk events, and the likelihood of each type of threat, your business can fail in building a thorough, effective business continuity program.
To avoid that, organizations should invest time in a business impact analysis (BIA), a process for understanding each risk category, and how it affects your particular organization in terms of operations, finances, reputation, and more – both in the short- and long-term. That process also empowers your leadership to prioritize the company's approach to risk prevention based on potential impact and probability. That can be especially useful for smaller organizations that can't afford consultants or commit large chunks of time toward business continuity planning.
You'll also find a helpful business impact analysis worksheet on the Ready.gov site, along with some other risk assessment tools. As part of this analysis, you need to establish or update your recovery time objective (RTO)—the amount of downtime your business can tolerate—and your recovery point objective (RPO)—the amount of data your business can afford to lose before the impacts are just too significant.
Develop Mitigation Strategies Unique to Each Threat
The last big mistake many organizations make when planning for a business disruption is laziness. They want to create one, vague response plan that serves as the mitigation strategy. Buzz! There is no way one simple plan will address all the subtleties of each type of threat. For example, risk management strategies for natural disaster planning, cyber attack planning, and pandemic planning are markedly different.
Instead, your team will need to invest the time and effort to consider how to prepare and then navigate through each type of threat scenario. Even something as straightforward as "get insurance" can mean different things depending on the type of disruption. Also, remember to include preparation as your first step in mitigating the impact of a threat. If several different threat scenarios create immediate havoc because you can't manage your business without power, then investing in a generator may be a step that helps you through multiple types of disruption.
Leveraging Technology Partners for Risk Management
Reputable managed services providers will work collaboratively with your organization to ensure your plans for business continuity extend well beyond a disaster recovery plan for your servers and some backup power solutions. But they can also help guide you toward technology solutions that may add value to your business continuity strategy. Most MSPs already use sophisticated monitoring technology to keep your IT environment highly available. But they can also recommend additional solutions that add layers of protection, such as access control solutions, video monitoring that includes sensors for fire and water, and more. They can also work with you to prepare, offering best practices as well as real-world experience gained from working with other clients over the years.
At Exigent, we understand how overwhelming business continuity planning can be for small to mid-sized businesses because we are one. And we've been helping clients plan for the worst for nearly 30 years. That means we've had our share of disruption and walked through fire (and flood) with more than a few of our clients. Let's talk about how we can help your organization with effective risk management.
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