By Rich Stanbaugh
July 15, 2010
When IT teams get together to discuss risk scenarios, the focus tends to be on the facilities and the suppliers (i.e., What if disaster strikes? What if we cannot get the materials we need to produce our product or service?). As we saw this past year, additional causes for risk now include epidemics or pandemics. Unfortunately, these risks rarely enter the thought process of business continuity planning. This year’s outbreak of H1N1, and recent destruction from tornados and flooding, has brought new risk scenarios to the forefront, forcing business managers to consider additional risks to their primary resource – their employees.
Small and medium businesses (SMB) are especially susceptible to the negative economic impacts of pandemics, extreme weather, transportation outages and all other forms of disaster scenarios. Considering that a good amount of SMBs are fighting to stay afloat as is, any disruption of business activity, combined with the current recession, could be detrimental to the success of the business.
If you’re an SMB looking at business continuity planning, what types of risks does a pandemic or disaster present to your business?
Productivity: On the low end of the scale in terms of business impact is productivity. As absenteeism rates begin to rise, it is natural that productivity suffers. Your employees may not be sick at all, but if they are unable make it to the office and must work remotely, without the proper technology in place, productivity will take a major hit.
Service Delivery: This type of scenario can have ripple effect on your business and supply chain. Higher rates of employee absenteeism can lead to an inability to deliver your products or services effectively. Additionally, your business may be prepared for a disaster, but what if your supplier is not? Successful business continuity planning includes not only streamlining your processes as an SMB, but incorporating your partners and customers as well, making sure communications and business activity remains active.
Complete Business Disruption: Severe weather, natural disasters or an acute flu outbreak at the office, in your supply chain, or in your community, can lead to complete business disruption. For example, what if too many employees are unable to get to work due to road conditions or a breakdown of public transportation? Additionally, employees being too sick to work can have a direct impact on those who are not sick, making them hesitant to come into the office out of fear of contracting an illness.
What steps should be taken to avoid a complete business disruption?
When developing your business continuity plan, consider the tools to help mitigate risks to your business. Establish effective telecommuting, remote access and sick leave policies is the first step. When these policies have been put in place, implement technology such as SLL VPN and remote access solutions that will allow your employees to stay connected to applications, secure e-mail, and your network, which will effectively maintain mission critical business communication.
Once you are confident that you have your internal workforce covered you can broaden your plan to include your external workforce and supply chain of vendors. Work to ensure that company/customer/supply chain interactions will be able to be maintained. The key is to enable your employees and suppliers to remain productive while maintaining effective communication across all business entities.
Rich Stanbaugh is President and Chief Executive Officer of ANX, a leading provider of networking and security managed services. He can be contacted at rstanbaugh@anx.com.