Hello readers and welcome to the Silentblast Blog. It has been a while since I last wrote in the blog and for those keeping an eye on the blog I apologize for the length of time away. My work and continuing education studies have taken the majority of my time and to a degree I had to put the blog on the side for a bit.

But for those of you who have been reading through my previous blog articles and in fact I wrote an article about blogs in general and how they can impact your business; rest assure it is fine to step away for a bit. Unless your book of business is journalism or a specific requirement to have a daily entry into a business type blog it should be fine to step away for a while and return. How else would you end up going on a vacation? Yes you could blog even while away from the office and on vacation; but you are on vacation.

So; the last I wrote about business continuity I spoke in simple terms of data back-up as an important part of business continuity. Just to reinforce the thought; sit back and look at your computer for a few minutes and think about all the data you have on it; emails, photos, songs, work data; whatever you have that if you lost, it would be missed. For some the scale of importance pertaining to each data type they may have on their computer is different.

But hopefully you are thinking more about backing up data you have currently and how important it truly can be. For business; it can mean being in business one day and virtually not in business the next.

So for today I am going write about some of the different aspects of the business continuity cycle. There are actually variations of it based on a specific domain be it; logistics or IT as an example, but this is more the grassroots version that literally can be used across any domain or business type. I won’t write about them all in this blog post. I will continue the remainder of them in the next post.

Analysis

In a nutshell; this is where you decide across your business model what is crucial and non-crucial. In truth all parts of your business is crucial. But to keep it really simple; it’s the choices you have to make on if a disaster happened what you would truly need to get back up and running again as soon as possible.

Solution Design

This phase essentially tables the most cost effective solutions based upon your analysis of the requirements of your business in order to get up and running again. I like to refer to this phase as the difference between requiring a new computer and a coffee maker. I am over-simplifying it in many ways, but in the end it’s about making hard choices.

Implementation

This is the phase where you simply enact the Solution Design phase. If for example you decided that will you will have a computer or several computers at a second location that stores your crucial data; it means getting those computers or services and commencing the controls and processes to actively move or transfer that data in a timely manner and on a regular basis.

Now to those reading; some of you may be thinking there is not a lot of substance to this article. I would even argue yes to a point. But the purpose of this article I am trying to achieve is to get you thinking about business continuity in some shape or form. Each business is different from each other. The requirements for business continuity changes in proportion to the business type, size of the business, location or multiple locations and a myriad of other factors. It would be impossible for me to write a boiler plate “do it all” article on business continuity.

However if you think about your business and begin to formulate scenarios in your head such as floods, fire, earthquakes, which are natural disasters and then consider other things like power outages, data loss and even theft.  Your eyes should begin to open wider that if you never considered those types of disasters affecting your business it might be prudent to begin thinking about them and what you would do in the “event of.”

Hopefully everyone is having a great summer and I will be back shortly for the remainder of the Business Continuity article to finish off the remainder of the business continuity cycle.

Silentblast Interactive - Toronto Website Design and Development

Canadian owned and operated, Silentblast is a professional web design and development company in Toronto serving small and mid-sized companies in the GTA, Brampton, Vaughan, North York, Markham, Mississauga, Oakville, Richmond Hill, Scarborough and Barrie, Ontario, Canada. Silentblast also develops mobile web site design and development and mobile applications for the iPhone and other mobile phone platforms.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 8:45 am and is filed under Business Web Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.