The Importance of Business Continuity – ISO 22301 Standard

By now, all businesses should understand the importance of Business Continuity and having an effective Business Continuity Plan. The value in Business Continuity planning is that it helps organizations proactively plan before unforeseen events unfold, especially as these unexpected circumstances usually lead to costly downtime.

Business Continuity plans take into account all of your organization’s valuable assets in order to ensure your inventory, customers, employees and other vital assets are protected even if you’re faced with adversity. These threats of downtime can range from environment-related damage such as flooding which Room Alert helps prevent, to natural disasters such as earthquakes, to cybersecurity attacks, pandemics and essentially anything unexpected that can potentially impact the normal operations of your business. As discussed in this article, “According to the global consulting firm Deloitte, greater than fifty percent of businesses without an effective business continuity plan will ultimately fail following a major disruption.” Without comprehensive Business Continuity planning, disaster will inevitably strike and may leave your business destroyed.

A common excuse for not developing a Business Continuity plan is facilities not knowing where to start, because Business Continuity covers a vast range of Preparedness, Disaster Prevention, Disaster Recovery, Risk Management and more. AVTECH has developed a FREE Business Continuity Checklist to help customers identify some of the areas within their business that they should plan to protect. For customers looking to formalize this planning process, the ISO 22301 standard provides a basic framework for businesses to follow. Regardless of if your organization is ISO-certified or not, this framework is easy to understand and beneficial to implement for smooth business operations.

Why is it important for your organization to establish a defined business continuity plan?

• 90% of businesses fail if they don’t reopen quick enough.
• 20% of businesses experience a failure (fire, flood, power outage, natural disaster, etc.) in any given year.
• The average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute.

When your organization invests in business continuity, you are helping to protect yourselves against these issues from harming your company, along with many other negative impacts that will cost you revenue and customer confidence.

Room Alert Environment Monitoring

All-encompassing Business Continuity should include environment monitoring to proactively prevent and minimize the 30% of downtime that is caused by environment-related issues. This year, Room Alert was given the “Best In Environment Monitoring Solutions” 2020 Award by Corporate Vision Magazine because we’re market leaders in Business Continuity and IT & Facilities Environment Monitoring since 1988. Also, we recently launched our new Room Alert Manager which is our next-gen local monitoring software platform. It provides all the popular features that we know our customers enjoyed previously in Device ManageR and adds even more useful capabilities to take proactive environment monitoring to the next level. Throughout the craziness of 2020, we’ve demonstrated how we implement Business Continuity both internally as a company, as well as externally in the products and services we offer through Room Alert. You can depend on Room Alert environment monitoring to ensure you’re proactively preventing and minimizing costly environment-related downtime while increasing productivity and uptime.