Business Continuity Planning In The COVID-19 Era

40% of businesses fail after a disaster. 90% of small businesses fail within the two years following. source ( )

With the onset of the pandemic, organizations were forced to implement a slew of fundamental changes, many of them overnight. Imagine for a moment they had ample time, knowledge, and adequate tools to prepare for a crisis of this magnitude. Armed with these capabilities, what might their business continuity plans have looked like?

What would the outcome have been? Would the same employees still be let go? How might supply chains look? Would factories have found ways to remain open? Might certain businesses be operating at near-maximum capacity?

There are no clear answers, as this crisis differs significantly from ones that organizations may have already prepared for.

The scale is massive. There’s a true collective, human experience. Many compounding known and unknown variables are at play. There are endless moving parts and dependencies that demand specific attention. Especially in scenarios like these, people must ask an endless series of questions in their Business Continuity Planning process so they can make the right decisions and ensure the best possible outcome.

Business Continuity Planning is the process of:

• Defining any and all risk that can affect operations in times of crisis
• Understanding the potential impact of those risks
• Developing and implementing a plan-of-action to accommodate those findings

As with many processes today, Business Continuity Planning must modernize to keep pace with the modern world, a world increasingly interconnected and complex. Accurate, accessible, and contextual data is a vital asset for organizations to properly characterize risk, analyze any potential impact, and improve decision-making.

"Accurate, accessible, and contextual data is a vital asset for organizations to properly characterize risk, analyze any potential impact, and improve decision-making"

Ultimately, the decisions made in times of crisis determine the outcome for those truly at the heart of business continuity planning: People. People are the greatest asset to any organization, especially during times of crisis, if simply for their potential of aiding recovery.

To aid recovery in a time of disruptive, unprecedented social change, people must reexamine old methods and identify new approaches. There is a need to handle the scope of what is occurring now and adjust for what may occur in the future. Understanding the relevance and relationships between data for this type of decision-making and outcome forecasting, then, becomes transmuted, and increasingly valuable.

The data required for this type of planning is often sourced from dozens of different solutions. Data on people and process. Data on applications. Data on systems, equipment, customers, suppliers. A mechanism capable of bringing this data together to create composite views is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity.

“A mechanism capable of bringing this data together to create composite views is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity.”

Join us over the next few weeks as we take a closer look at the evolving role of data and its systems in the new age of Business Continuity Planning, and as we identify how data-driven decisions will be instrumental in guiding and driving change both now and in the future.

Next in this series:

Business Continuity Planning in the Covid19 Era

Part I: “Rising To The New Normal”

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