Question

- Explain why Disaster Planning is essential to the continued operation of Your Firm. Identify and explain at least 3 necessary steps to building a Disaster Plan for Your Firm.

Answer 1

For businesses be it small or big having an emergency preparedness planning can make the difference between staying in business and losing everything. Be it a natural calamity situations like Hurricane season or a situation like a pandemic for example, Covid-19, it’s always important to have a disaster plan in place so that the continuity of the business is not hampered.

Example: Due to Covid-19, majority of the people were forced to stay back and home in order to take care of themselves. While it was an important for the firms to protect its employees, it was also important to make sure that along with the well being of the employees, the company is also able to generate enough profitability so that the company can pay off its employees and have its business running. This is where the disaster planning team comes into action.

Mentioned below are some of the necessary steps which the business has to undergo in building an efficient disaster plan.

1. Identify the risk – Over here it would be the impact of the pandemic over the business as due to lockdown the employees are not allowed to leave their homes and if the work is not continued, it would lead to a decline in revenues and over a period of time lead to closure.

2. Develop a plan – Many companies were quick on their feet to design a work from home module in order to make sure that the work can be continued despite staying at home and both the employees and companies benefit out of it. So the company had to develop software and servers through which the company could carry out the work without impacting the company’s privacy policy

3. Implement and Train – While it was important to develop a plan it was important to train the employees so that despite working from home, the efficiency and quality of work was not impacted.

Every company has to come with a disaster plan of their own as it’s never a “one size fits all” strategy. While the work from home plan worked out for IT companies other companies came with a different plan.