What is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is an essential step to mitigate the effect to your business operations in the event of disasters such as a storm, fire, or crime. Since the majority of business is done on computers today, ensuring your entire IT network is prepared for disasters is the focal point of any business continuity plan.

Why do I need a Business Continuity Plan?

Incidents that can affect your operations occur every day. Events such as accidentally deleted files, hardware failures, data theft, and natural disasters are just a few examples of incidents that cause catastrophic problems if a business is not properly prepared. The purpose of a BCP is to prevent and prepare for these events should they ever occur—and for most problems it is a matter of when, not if.

There are many different ways to secure your business and improve your preparedness, and to varying levels to match any budget. A BCP can be as comprehensive as needed, but should always take into account protecting your hardware as well as your data.

Creating a plan

There are many different ways to secure your business and improve your preparedness, and to varying levels to match any budget. A BCP can be as comprehensive as needed, but should always encompass protection of your mission-critical hardware and data. Server colocation is just one of the great methods of reducing your overall risk by housing your servers off-site. The Greater Toronto Area is no stranger to summer thunderstorms and severe winter storms; for this reason one of the most basic steps to protecting your hardware from power outages and power surges is to install Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) for your servers and other valuable equipment so that a millisecond-long surge doesn't destroy years' worth of data and thousands of dollars' worth of equipment.

Most equipment can be replaced fairly easily, but the real value of your business is derived your your data. Excell IT offers a full range of solutions for protecting and backing up your data from both internal and external threats. The first step is to ensure that your network is set up properly, with your domain controllers, virtual machine hosts, and virtual machine configurations are following best practices. To check to see if your systems are following best practices, contact us and we will provide you with a free IT audit! Our IT consultants will also help implement proper data backup solutions, including local backups to be performed at regular intervals, and remote backup solutions to our Mississauga-based Tier 4 data center.