Your business depends on IT to keep it running. Business continuity planning ensures that natural disasters, cyberattacks, and other unforeseen circumstances will be minimally disruptive.
See what your continuity plan can look like!
Having a plan for how you’ll maintain operations if one or more key systems fail not only makes the organization more prepared, but also gives management a deeper understanding of how the business functions. Business continuity planning helps you see exactly how you use the technology you own.
When you understand how you can maintain operational continuity in a variety of circumstances, your overall level of business risk is reduced. The more scenarios you can plan for, the greater your resilience. You’ll need to think about what to do in case of a disaster impacting one or more of your facility locations, and in case of a failure of a single system component as well as multiple simultaneous failures.
Typically, business continuity planning engagements begin with an audit. We’ll assess:
We take the time to understand what degree of business continuity you really require. Which operational processes can be disrupted, and for how long? Then we create a plan to enable you to achieve the continuity you need. We always take your individual risks into consideration. Some plans include managing the total loss of a building in a natural disaster. All evaluate possible failover options for individual hardware components in your IT environment.
The key is to identify which types of failures are possible, which are likely, and how they apply to your business. Key areas to think about are natural disasters, equipment failures, accidents, malicious activities perpetrated internally, malicious activities perpetrated by cybercriminals, and other external threats. By the time we’ve had a short conversation with you, it’s usually easy for us to identify where to focus our time and attention.
One of the most important concepts to understanding in business continuity planning determining what the business can withstand without great difficulty. Two key terms are Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RPO describes how much data you’ll lose (how long it’s been since the last backup was created), and RTO denotes how long it will take to restore operations.
It depends on your approach. Turning to the cloud can allow you to build resilient IT systems at a much lower cost than that of dedicated servers for failover at each of your locations. Once you’ve decided on the backup and failover architecture you need, you can then determine how to build it cost-effectively.
A business continuity plan covers procedures and instructions for an organization to follow in the case of disasters. This plan includes recovery strategies, backups of data, human resources, and more. It ensures that the organization is protected and can return to normalcy as quickly after a disaster.
The plan is to mitigate and avoid any risks that could follow an unplanned disaster. The plan can reduce disruptions for your organization, saving you time and money.
I got to know Marc and CNS because he was sent to our Newark operation where in a single visit he identified the problems we were having in our network and fixed everything in a return trip. I was so impressed I invested in his company!
Anton Schiffenhaus
Chairman of the Board
The CNS team was great. They worked with us tirelessly in the most severe situation we have ever faced. CNS uniquely understood the need in our operation having worked many years with boxmakers. We genuinely could not have gotten back on our feet without them.
Laura Boucher
Chief of Staff
It’s not often that your vendors deliver what they promise in the sales process, but CNS has been great. They adhere to the motto, “under promise and over deliver.” Every time we needed them, they were on the spot and stuck with us until the need was met, even when it wasn’t technically their issue to solve.
Steve Olroyd
CIO
CNS Partners is a group of highly credentialed individuals who take pride in managing the IT needs of manufacturers with a carefully crafted and comprehensive solution suite ranging from high-performing servers to best in market help desk and field services.