Where Does Business Continuity End?

Disasters at work come in various forms: earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, fires, epidemics, and power outages.

Read “Can Business Continuity Survive Without IT?”

Business Continuity workers take swift action, assessing the situation before ensuring safety and productivity. They contact first responders, relocate employees, communicate with managers, and count heads to be sure everyone is out of harm’s way.

Whether employees are sent home or moved to a relocation facility, we often assume that the job of Business Continuity Management is done.

BCM Ends Where Productivity Begins
If you work in an office, consider for a moment the services and applications supplied by your company’s IT department:

• Security and malware protection running in the background
• Email
• A secure wifi and wired internet connection
• Other communication services like Slack
• File storage services like DropBox
• Productivity tools like Evernote
• Access to an intranet

But in a new, hastily constructed business environment, Business Continuity’s responsibilities often end before these business issues have been mitigated. If your employees are moved to an insecure location, they may be using their own laptops, tablets and phones. They are vulnerable to malware attacks, data breaches and service denials that could be more damaging than the original disaster event.

BCM Must Align with IT
Your BCM team must align with your IT Department to ensure secure, productive work after BCM has done its job. By communicating quickly with IT, BCM can retain control of the situation and have the final say that business as usual has been restored.

Find out more in our new white paper, Can Business Continuity Survive Without IT? You will find it in our Resources section, and it answers many of the questions you may have about securing the work environment after a disaster.

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