How long can your business run for without access to data or your devices?

A huge portion of our work with clients is helping them to form a robust business continuity (BC) plan.

But what is a BC plan?

Well, we start by working out how much revenue a business can generate in a single day. From here we dig deeper and work with business owners to establish how much of this revenue is generated via digital assets (think POS systems, website etc) as well as how valuable their data is, for example, a law firm places enormous value on their database both from a financial and a reputational perspective. Finally, we examine time. How much does it cost to keep your business running with no money coming in?

Once we have established the dependence a business has on its digital assets, as well as running costs, we begin to ask tough questions such as ‘’so if you didn’t have access to your network, how long would you be able to keep the doors open for?’’. Very quickly we begin to learn that the vast majority of businesses would have to close the doors anywhere between 1 day and 2 weeks.

Worryingly, according to government statistics, on average it takes 23 days for a business to be completely cleared after a cyber attack. That’s potentially 23 days of downtime where a business can’t access some, or all of their digital assets. To further bolster these alarming statistics, the average cost of a cyber attack to an Australian business is $276,323 – with a whopping 53% of this being spent on detection of the hack (virus, phishing attempt etc) and recovery.

So, in short, business continuity is a process where we work closely with clients to create a plan which will get them back up and running in a matter of HOURS rather than weeks. The value of this has already shown itself to be obvious to numerous Tasmanian businesses of varying size.

Some of our planning and implementation in the BC space include, but are not limited to; on-site and off-site secure back-up of data, penetration testing, cyber hack monitoring software and disaster recovery planning.

A disaster, in this sense is known as; ‘an occurrence that disrupts the functioning of an organisation resulting in the loss of data, loss of personnel, loss of business, or loss of time’

We’d love you to join many of our clients and work with us to set up your business continuity plan.