Fight Cyber Crime with Business Continuity
A strong business continuity plan can help prevent or reduce the risk of a cyber-attack. Seventy-two percent of small and mid-sized business survey respondents said they expect to increase their investments in business continuity over the next 12 to 24 months to prevent cyber-attacks, according to an article on TalkingCloud.com. (The survey included 700 SMBs from around the world and focused on the current state of SMB business continuity and disaster recovery planning.) SMBs are increasingly looking for simple, affordable and easy-to-deploy business continuity solutions that protect against cybercrime.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan is a defined process to ensure that your business operations continue when an adverse event occurs. This is NOT a disaster recovery plan, which is specific to ensuring the availability of your IT environment including the data. A business continuity plan is all-encompassing and must include a data backup and DR plan as a part of the overall strategy. The main goal of business continuity management is to keep the company running smoothly and limit the amount of downtime, and risk to the business.
Why You Need a Business Continuity Plan
Many SMBs think establishing a business continuity plan is too costly and not worth the investment. However, can an SMB actually afford not to have a BC plan? The survey referenced on TalkinCloud.com, found that the average estimated cost for an hour of downtime for an SMB ranges from $8,220 to $25,600, and an unplanned event typically lasts up to 24 hours.
The biggest threat to critical business data is cybercrime, and a BC plan could help prevent an attack or drastically limit the downtime resulted from the breach. A study by The Ponemon Institute found that organizations that involved business continuity management in cyber security planning are 5 percent less likely to suffer a data breach; yet, 55 percent of companies do not involve BCM in data breach planning. However, it seems SMBs are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of business continuity planning as the threat of cyberattacks becomes more likely.
SMBs should work hand-in-hand with their hosting provider, whether virtual or physical, to ensure that all of their critical data and applications are included in their business continuity plan.
