In the past several months, we’ve seen environmental events cause billions of dollars of damage for North American businesses. We’ve seen ice storms virtually close down major cities for days without electrical power. Floodwaters have swamped vast city blocks on different parts of the continent, causing untold headaches. Hurricanes and tornadoes seem to threaten more and more.
The smart organization prepares itself for such catastrophic events with a disaster recovery plan, involving offsite backup and recovery systems. But beyond the IT elements, organizations need to develop a set of emergency procedures in order to deal with the crisis as efficiently as possible.
Crisis Communications
For example, communication becomes an even more critical function in times of crisis. You not only need to coordinate fully with your entire staff, but you need to immediately explain what is happening to customers and service users. Recent events have shown that even large organizations (and utilities!) have had trouble with crisis communications. Your organization needs to prepare for not only how to communicate during a crisis; it needs to be prepared for what exactly to communicate, and when to do it. (This will be the case even though a situation may have caught you by surprise and you have no clue what’s actually happening.)
Take Stock & Prepare A Plan of Action
In order to know what exactly to say to staff and stakeholders during a time of crisis, organizations need to take a step back and take inventory of their entire operations. You need to understand what your most important services are, what your most important systems are, and what and where your most important data, documents and files are. Then anticipate the impact on your stakeholders!
You will need to put a prioritized IT recovery plan in place. But you will also require a detailed plan for staffing in case of emergency, a plan for internal and external communications, and a plan to coordinate off-site operations in case of failover. Document this plan, and practice it. Keep copies of the plan accessible to all who would need it when it is necessary.
Anticipate Scenarios In Advance
Even the best-laid plans cannot contemplate every possible scenario. Catastrophic events have a way of bringing unforeseen weaknesses to the fore. If something goes wrong with a backup system, you need to consider alternative backup possibilities. Let’s say an offsite storage drive failed. You need to discover other ways to retrieve lost data. Can you retrieve files from old Gmail attachments? Is there data on public sharing sites, such as DropBox or OneDrive that you can recover?
The point is simple. The better prepared you are for a disaster, the better your organization will emerge from any crisis.
