Operational Continuity

Why does operational continuity planning matter?

Operational continuity planning plays a key role in facilitating the long-term success of organizations. It does this in several key ways:

• Financial stability: Organizations that experience unexpected downtime inevitably experience a loss of revenue as a result of being unable to provide products or services. By prioritizing operational continuity, organizations can recover rapidly from incidents and avoid revenue loss to ensure long-term stability.

• Consumer trust: Disrupted access to products and services makes a company appear unreliable and erodes trust, causing the organization to lose customers. By maintaining operational continuity, organizations can build a strong reputation that fosters trust and loyalty among customers.

• Regulation compliance: In some cases, industry standards and regulations often mandate that companies demonstrate preparedness and have contingency plans for potential disruptions. By engaging in thorough operational continuity planning, organizations can ensure that they comply with regulations to avoid potential penalties.

  
  

What are common risks to operational continuity?

There is a wide variety of potential threats that organizations must consider when planning operational continuity. Common risks include the following:

• Cyberattacks: Cyberattacks are one of the most pertinent threats to operational continuity. Threats like ransomware attacks can leave organizations unable to access critical resources and systems, leading to data loss and costly downtime.

• Natural disasters: Extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes, or earthquakes can potentially cause damage to an organization’s physical infrastructure, affecting servers, operational technologies, and industrial control systems. This can disrupt manufacturing processes, supply chains, and digital delivery systems.

• System failures: Misconfigurations, bugs, hardware malfunctions, and legacy system degradation can cause major system outages. This can disrupt critical operations and processes, harming operational continuity.

  
  

What are best practices for maintaining operational continuity?

In order to maintain continuity in their essential operations and processes, organizations need to exercise vigilance and preparedness against potential risks. The following are some key practices which can help to facilitate operational continuity:

• Redundant infrastructure: Organizations likely to encounter disruption should implement redundant systems. This means having secondary systems in alternate locations that can take over operations in the event that main systems are not functional.

• Backup and recovery planning: Companies should conduct regular backups of their data to ensure that critical resources are not lost in the event of an incident. These backups must be safeguarded in air-gapped environments to ensure that they are protected against unauthorized access and ready for fast deployment. Additionally, security teams should have clearly established protocols for incident response and recovery.

• Continuous monitoring: Security teams can employ continuous monitoring, typically with the aid of automated security tools, to continuously monitor activity on company networks. This facilitates the early detection of suspicious behavior so that response and recovery plans can be put into action as early as possible should a cyberattack occur.