Africa-Press – Malawi. Many professionals tend to operate on the premise and assumption that their organisations, or business, will remain largely unchanged. As such, they find comfort in routines. However, the reality is that events that include disasters, be it natural or man-made, just like we experienced with the Covid pandemic, do happen and disrupt business. Therefore, a key aspect of leadership is to prepare for those interruptions and come up with strategies and plans that can sustain core business functions during and after disasters. This entails adopting business continuity and disaster recovery strategies.
Put simply, business continuity refers to the ability of an organisation to maintain critical business functions during and after a disaster. It is about keeping essential services up and running. This means conducting an organisational self-reflection and deciding the core and essential functions. Once these crucial components have been identified, redundancy or failover mechanisms are put in place.
For instance, network redundancy and failover mechanisms are essential for ensuring high availability, reliability and performance of network systems by allowing network devices and services to continue functioning in the event of failures, errors and congestion. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, specifically dwells on plans that a business puts into place for responding to catastrophic events that include natural disaster, fire, acts of terror, cybercrime, among others. The focus for disaster recovery is to return to safe and normal operation as quickly as possible.
When businesses face disasters and have no proper plans on continuity and disaster recovery in place, the effects can be catastrophic. For instance, when a business goes without delivering its products and services, it suffers financial losses, which may eventually lead to job losses, among other challenges. Further, the absence of business continuity plans and disaster recovery may result in technological consequences such as loss of important and sensitive data when disasters strike.
Therefore, having effective business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans is being prepared for unpredictable events and potential threats such as natural disasters, fires, disease outbreaks, pandemics, technological hazards, machine and hardware failure, supply chain disruptions, cyberattacks and other external threats. This preparation is important as it ensures protection of personnel, assets and systems.
Further, the fact that planning includes identifying all risks to company operations makes business continuity and disaster recovery plans part of the overall organisation’s risk management strategy.
In conclusion, it must be emphasised that organisations or companies are prone to a whole range of disasters that vary in magnitude and intensity, thus from minor to catastrophic levels. These events could be natural disasters, fires, acts of terror, cybercrime, flooding, among others. This, therefore, demands organisational leadership to anticipate these disruptions and prepare on how to respond in the event of occurrence.
Therefore, business continuity and disaster recovery plans are an important part of an organisation or business as they help organisations continue operating in the event of threats and disruptions, which could have otherwise led to financial losses and a drop in profitability.
As a recap, it should be noted that business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans have different goals in that one focuses on keeping business operational during a disaster, and the latter— which is disaster recovery— focuses on restoring safe and normal operations after a disaster.
Put differently, effective business continuity plans minimise the time that the operation takes whereas effective disaster recovery plans cut down the time in which the system is inefficiently functioning. Therefore, a combination of their application ensures an organisation’s anticipation to any form of disruption and comprehensive preparation for disasters, be it man-made or natural.
Finally, the application of business continuity and disaster recovery plans should be prioritised by organisation leadership and be effectively internalised in organisations and companies to ensure resilience during and after disasters and other disruptions. The focus is on minimising operational downtime as well as achieving minimum recovery or restoration time in the event of a disaster.
The strategy is to design critical functions and infrastructures— for instance, network and data redundancy platforms— to provide multiple paths for traffic to keep data flowing in the event of failure. The creation of the critical functions and infrastructures should always consider various disaster possibilities.
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