Wonder

COVID-19 Impact on Business Continuity

Delivered March 18, 2020. Contributor: David K.

Goals

To learn how the coronavirus affects business continuity, in order to write a white paper.

Early Findings

Traditional business continuity and disaster preparedness plans usually don't provide guidance surrounding how to sustain day-to-day activities when the employee population is unstable.
The virus outbreak is expected to mostly influence how companies go about their daily activites. Companies operating using a mix of on-premise and Internet-based platforms need to develop plans which ensure employees can continue working from home. These scenarios are not often parts of companies' business continuity policies.
Policies for these types of scenarios should address how to quickly enable employees to work from home. For example, the company should have an adequate number of VPN licenses prepared and intrustion protection systems should be ready to launch, in order for the company to be able to quickly and securely transfer business operations to employees' homes.
Moving business data to the cloud makes accessing business information easier from around the world. This practice speeds up the business transition and simplifies business continuity.
Also, employees should be communicated with regularly and reliably during the vuris pandemic, as this increases transparency and trust. Employees should be informed about what the company is doing to reduce risk and fight the epidemic, and they want to hear hard facts.

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