Wheter services or products your small enterprise provides, ensuring business continuity will pay by itself. Disaster happens and it will happen eventually, it is just a matter of “when will it happen”.

With every new day you open your doors to existing and potential customers the complexity of your operation, the ammount of vital information, the business inteligence and “know how” grows exponentially.

The first thing a business owner or decision maker should ask is how much the small enterprise has invested in creating the business process as it is today, the time expent gathering valuable information data and indexing it in the current information system in a meaningfull way.

We have drafted this short list of steps as an initial guide for decision makers wanting to ensure their operation survives a disaster event.

1 – Identify an make a list of internal external threats that could compromise your ability to provide products services to your customers.

2 – Identify key persons within your organization that have the knowledge ability to respond in case of disaster to aide on the reorganization process. Inform them and gather their input on what they consider essential.

3 – Make sure there are copies of your most important business specific forms printed and stored in a separate geographical location.

4 – Implement and test an efective information data backup strategy. Test often thoroughly to make sure recovery is possible. Make sure your data, account receivables and customer information is properly backed up on a separate geographical location by having a live offsite backup site or copies stored in digital media offsite.

5 – Write down a general disaster recovery plan. Inform and distribute copies to all involved personeel. Make sure every identified possible threat in step #1 is covered and that you have at least a workable solution for it.

6 – Provide or negotiate the availability of basic communication means in a separate geographical site. This should include at least a working space, phone lines, laptops or some other computing equipment.

This is the first on a series of articles to inform small bussines owners on disaster recovery best practices solutions. Keep checking our blog for updates and valuable information.