Why Your Business Continuity Plan Should Cover Communication and Office Access


Imagine a scenario where your company’s digital infrastructure goes offline. Your servers are unreachable, the company website is offline, internal communication stops working and employees are locked out of offices because keycard security systems are down. Your entire company—literally everything it does—just stops. It’s a nightmare scenario, but if you’re prepared with a business continuity plan, it can be a short-term inconvenience instead of a company disaster. As we’ve seen just recently with the massive Facebook outage, these scenarios can happen to any organization. 


Company-wide communication disruptions can be triggered from internal incidents, such as misconfigured servers or routers, cut cables and other hardware and software failures. They can also come from the outside in the form of natural disasters like wildfires, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes. And of course, there’s always the chance that disruptions are due to actual cyber attacks by hostile actors. Recognizing that both internal and external scenarios are possible is key in developing a backup communication and access plan before disaster strikes.


While a remote workforce means at least some of your staff will be out of harm’s way should an actual natural disaster strike the office, it doesn’t mean they won’t be impacted by your infrastructure downtime. Offline servers mean work-from-home employees can’t access hosted files, data and apps. If your communication infrastructure is down, too, they don’t have any way to stay on top of the incident status. Without a backup communication plan, on-site employees won’t have any idea how long they’ll be locked out of offices if the security system is also d ..

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