It’s no fun to think about all the ways your business can be disrupted—hurricanes, tsunamis, snow storms, epidemics, earthquakes, tornados, terrorism, floods, fires, even relatively minor incidents like a failed water main or a planned event like an office relocation. It’s the kind of thing that keeps business execs and IT leaders up at night. The best remedy: a solid business continuity strategy you can count on to minimize the impact and keep your business running through thick or thin. The following seven elements are essential parts of any effective business continuity strategy.

1. 7 key elements of business continuity
It’s no fun to think about all the ways your business can be disrupted—hurricanes,
tsunamis, snow storms, epidemics, earthquakes, tornados, terrorism, floods, fires, even
relatively minor incidents like a failed water main or a planned event like an office
relocation. It’s the kind of thing that keeps business execs and IT leaders up at night.
The best remedy: a solid business continuity strategy you can count on to minimize the
impact and keep your business running through thick or thin.
The following seven elements are essential parts of any effective business continuity
strategy.
1. A clearly defined team
In an emergency, people shouldn’t have to wonder who’s in charge. Create a business
continuity team with members in every part of your organization, in every location
where you operate. These individuals will lead the local response to local events as well
as the organization-wide response for both local and broader-based emergencies. They
should stay involved in planning and testing throughout the year to keep the plan upto-date and gain the familiarity they’ll need to perform under the pressure of an actual
emergency. High-level support is crucial to make sure business continuity gets the
attention and resources it should.

2. 2. A detailed plan
Think through the kind of disruptions that could occur in each place where you do
business. Assume the worst, then figure out what you’d need to do to maintain your
most important operations. Rank your recovery priorities in business terms such as
revenue, regulatory implications, brand concerns, customer protection—whatever
matters most to your organization—then map these to applications, people, facilities
and equipment. Once your business continuity team has come to an agreement on this
analysis (which isn’t always easy), it can start to identify recovery strategies and costs
around each process. This will also help IT make sure that the most critical applications
will be available to the business within an established recovery time objective (RTO)
and recovery point objective (RPO).
3. Effective testing
An out-of-date or ineffective business continuity plan can be worse than none at all,
giving you a false sense of security and leaving you to scramble when things go wrong.
Review and update your plan at least once a year, and ideally more often than that, to
reflect changes in your IT environment, business priorities, operational structure and
other factors. Conduct full simulations at least annually as well, covering everything
from application recoverability to crisis communications. Supplement these with
frequent tabletop exercises that introduce new twists into disaster scenarios to keep
you on your toes.
4. Crisis communications
Effective communications can make the difference between panic and smooth
emergency response. Create a toolkit that encompasses the full range of
communications channels, including telecom, email, public address, intranet, IM,
texting and the company website. Draft sample emergency messages in advance so they
can be updated quickly during an actual emergency, and make sure you’re prepared to
deliver a consistent message to the public as well through press releases, social media
updates and interviews with spokespeople.

3. 5. Employee safety
Nothing is more important than keeping people safe. Local agencies such as the Red
Cross, fire department and police department, as well as federal entities, such as the
FEMA Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT), can provide emergency
response training and other guidance for your program. Tailor your procedures to your
workforce, facilities and locations, and review and test them regularly with all
employees.
6. Uninterrupted access to business resources
It’s important to keep people working—not just to maintain productivity, but to protect
data and make sure your customers aren’t left hanging. Remote access technologies
make it possible for people to work wherever it’s safe and convenient, whether at
home, in a hotel conference room, at a friend’s house or anywhere else. Organizations
that already enable mobile workstyles are way ahead of the game in this scenario.
Instead of having to get used to disaster mode as an entirely different way of working,
people just keep using the same remote access tools they always do, just in a different
physical setting.
7. Continuous IT operations
Datacenter continuity is the final element. Most large organizations already have more
than one datacenter for scale and redundancy. If one comes offline for any reason—
planned or unplanned—people should be able to switch seamlessly to another to access
the same apps and data. Make sure your infrastructure can support this response in
terms of rapid, automated failover, load balancing and network capacity.
Citrix offers many technologies and best practices to help your business through
disruptions of all kinds. You can learn more here:
www.citrix.com/businesscontinuity[1].
1. http://www.citrix.com/solutions/business-continuity/overview.html