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Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse than they already are, the area that the business operates is stuck by a natural disaster while also dealing with the pandemic (COVID-19). While IT Security is always looking for what could possibly impact the business, IT Security Pros can’t plan for everything. While the pandemic has stretched resources and stressed the staff beyond all measure, just imagine adding another significant event on top of it all. Multiple Treats While IT Security has the ability to plan for the unforeseeable, being able to deal with multiple business impacting events at the same time can be challenging to say the least. Planning for business interruptions or impacting events should be a part of every company’s Business Continuity Plan (BCP). While a natural disaster may be a onetime impacting event, and may have a short duration impact on the infrastructure of the business, add the ongoing pandemic on top of that, and now you have even more issues. The pandemic has stretched first-responder resources thin and hospitals and governmental agencies are struggling to deal with an already overloaded system. While the task may seem daunting, it can be planned for and a strategy can be developed in order to deal with multiple threats at the same time. Prioritizing the recovery efforts and planning on what a recovery will look like will be key to your planning process. Pandemic Planning While a lot of businesses were caught with no pandemic response plan prior to COVID-19 becoming one. Some actually had plans in place and had thought about how they would respond to one if it was ever declared. Companies have not been planning for a pandemic, nor did they exactly know how the government would react to the infection rates and how they planned on stopping its spread. Some businesses over the years have rolled their pandemic response plan into their BCP, while others had a standalone policy. Regardless of the method, planning for response to a virus and how it infects the population can be nerve-racking and difficult to deal with all of the variables that seem to be around the recovery process. Systematic Recovery Approach Just like any other business impacting event, it takes a systematic approach to the recovery effort in order to recover in a logical manner. The following list will help guide this process:
Returning to Normal Life during the pandemic is not normal in any definition of that word. But, the pandemic will be resolved as we fight it with the various means that we have. Whether this is in the next few months or over the next few years, this is still an unknown for the world. But we will return to “normal” and it is for that time that we continue to plan for disaster even during the pandemic. We all hope that we can put this time behind us and get back to the way things were before. But the longer this pandemic goes on, the more likely that will not happen anytime soon. Testing the Plan
While testing is one of the hallmarks of having an effective BCP, doing this during the recent state of things doesn’t make a lot of sense (in my honest opinion). That being said, there are specific things that can be done to help to solidify the plan and to identify any potential issues with the plan:
All of these different areas help to ensure that the overall plan is effective and that in case it may be needed that the company will have confidence in the plan and its ability to recover the business during a disaster. Summary While everyone is in the mindset of dealing with a disaster due to the pandemic, it may be a great time to evaluate the other established plans. Making sure that they are still effective and that they will hold up to a potential incident if the time were to come. Testing small portions of the overall plans helps to limit a potential disruption while still providing a realistic approach to the testing and evaluation process. Companies are continuing to focus on how the pandemic is impacting their business operations, but being prepared for what may be around the next corner will help to protect the business after the pandemic is over. What you learn now may help save the business, even during these uncertain times.
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January 2023
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