Vancouver offers one of the most dynamic business environments in Canada. The catch is that it’s also one of the least stable. This region is increasingly prone to natural disasters, and cyber-attacks are never far away. Organizations here face a combination of risk factors that make outages almost inevitable.
Yet for many of these companies, business continuity planning is still sitting on the to-do list. It’s all too easy for this crucial task to feel unimportant and abstract… Until an incident occurs and it’s already too late.
This article will teach you why business continuity planning is non-negotiable for Vancouver businesses, which incidents you’re most likely to experience, and how to survive them without breaking a sweat.
Why Business Continuity Planning in Vancouver Isn’t Optional
Business continuity planning is essential for most organizations. But in Vancouver, it should be considered mission critical. This is due to the unique risk factors this city faces. Understanding these factors doesn’t just tell you why planning is necessary – it also shows you what to focus on.
Your business continuity plan will need to cover three main areas:
Earthquake Preparedness in Vancouver
Vancouver sits near the Cascadia Subduction Zone, one of the largest seismic risk zones in the North American continent. Here, earthquakes are common and often devastating. A serious one can have widespread consequences, such as power disruptions, damaged roads, and even complete destruction of essential structures.
What This Means for You: You’ll need to plan for severe and extended disruptions, not just brief outages.
Wildfire Business Continuity
Wildfires are already a known risk factor in Vancouver, and are only projected to worsen in light of droughts and a warming planet. Even if the city itself manages to avoid being struck, the effects of ongoing fires nearby can impact your operations. Air quality and evacuations may damage attendance and productivity, while supply chain disruptions and power instability can directly affect your office.
What This Means for You: Remote work capability must be a priority, even if you don’t plan to implement it business-wide. Staff may not always have the ability to show up at the office.
Cyber Disaster Recovery
Cyber threats aren’t a geographic threat, but they’re still one of the most important to consider. Ransomware, data breaches, and other compromises can be just as disruptive as a natural disaster. More concerningly, each successful attack damages client trust, potentially resulting in far-reaching consequences for your long-term profitability.
What This Means for You: Cybersecurity and incident recovery are crucial considerations moving forward.
Building a Business Impact Analysis
Before any other work is done, you need to understand what you’re protecting. A business impact analysis (BIA) helps prioritize your efforts by showing you which vulnerabilities are most important to address.
Your BIA should cover:
- Which business processes are essential to day-to-day operation
- Which systems and data those processes depend on
- The financial, operational, and reputational impact of each function being unavailable
- Dependencies on third parties, suppliers, and infrastructure outside your direct control
- Which staff roles are critical and what single points of failure exist in your team
RTO and RPO Planning
As with any other business investment, you’ll need metrics in order to track success. The two most important to keep your eye on are recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
- RTO: The maximum amount of time your business can tolerate losing a particular system or function for.
- RPO: The amount of data you can afford to lose (usually measured using the data’s age – for example, data from one day ago).
Defining these metrics early is crucial for the success of your business continuity plan.
Data Backup Strategies
If you lost all business data today, could operations continue? The answer is usually “No”, and this is why backups are essential. Follow these strategies to ensure mission critical information remains available:
- Follow the 3-2-1 Rule: Three copies of all data, across two different media, one of which should be offsite. This makes true loss virtually impossible.
- Automate the Process: Manual backups rely on people remembering to run them, and this creates a major vulnerability. Always automate backups where possible.
- Encrypt Backups: Backups are useless if threat actors can compromise them just as easily as your regular storage. Always encrypt this data.
- Test the Restoration Process: Backups fail more often than you might expect. Don’t assume the restoration process will work. Test it regularly.
Preserving Productivity When the Office Isn’t Available
An outage or cyber-attack is one thing. But natural disasters, evacuations, and quarantines have the potential to shut down your office for days or weeks, and Vancouver businesses need a way to ensure operations continue during this time. The best solution is implementing remote work capabilities. You may not need them now, but they could one day be the only thing standing between you and extended downtime.
Consider:
- Cloud-based productivity platforms that staff can access from any device and location
- Secure remote desktop access to internal systems where cloud alternatives aren’t available
- Clearly documented instructions for accessing remote tools, written for staff who may be stressed and working from unfamiliar devices
- Multi-factor authentication configured in advance, so access isn’t blocked at the worst possible moment
Remember to familiarize staff with these systems long before they’re ever needed.
Communication When Normal Channels Are Down
Never assume that your normal communication systems will remain online during an emergency. The tools you rely on most – office phones, email services, and collaboration platforms – could all break down when you need them most.
Plan:
- An internal communication system for staff members and leadership
- An external communication system for partners and clients
- A way for employees and clients to continue collaborating on tasks
Who’s Doing What?
Even the best business continuity plan will fall apart if nobody understands what they’re supposed to be doing. Clearly defining roles and responsibilities in advance will prevent communication breakdowns and keep things running smoothly.
Some roles to consider:
- Business Continuity Manager: Delegates tasks and develops a strategy.
- Point of Contact: Responsible for managing communications both internally and externally.
- Business Continuity Test Manager: Tests recovery processes to ensure they work.
- Recovery Technician: Gets systems back online after a failure.
- Cybersecurity Specialist: Handles active threats and addresses vulnerabilities during a crisis.
Remember that this is only a starting point, not a comprehensive list. You may need more roles, or different ones entirely.
Business Continuity Plan Testing: The Step You Should Never Skip
Ultimately, an untested business continuity plan is little more than a suggestion. It doesn’t matter how well-developed your strategies are if they don’t work in practice. To avoid this, test your plan at least once per year and again after any significant changes are made.
Types of tests you should conduct include:
- Tabletop Exercises: Walk through a simulated scenario (such as an earthquake or ransomware attack), so gaps can be identified without the pressure of a real event.
- Technical Recovery Tests: Check technological processes to ensure they work as expected.
- Practical Drills: Run through the entire incident response and recovery process step-by-step, to uncover weaknesses in real time.
Keep Your Business Running, No Matter What Happens
Business continuity planning might feel pointless, but every investment you make today will pay dividends eventually. Whether you experience a minor outage, a high-profile data breach, or a major earthquake, you’ll be ready for it. Just remember to test your plan regularly and prepare your staff ahead of time, and you can’t go wrong.
Need help planning for the worst? As a Vancouver-based company ourselves, we understand exactly what it takes to keep a business running in this environment. Explore our business continuity solutions to learn more.