Why Business Continuity Planning?
Every organization faces disruption, be it a lengthy internet outage, a cybersecurity incident or a pandemic. A successful business continuity plan aims to restore an organization’s business processes after disruption, beginning with critical functions.
“In the event of a crisis, our main goals are to understand how we can continue providing instruction to students and continue paying our faculty and staff members,” Wyld says.
Business continuity planning includes elements such as disaster recovery, incident response, crisis management and emergency action planning to ensure the most comprehensive recovery possible in the face of a crisis or emergency that might disrupt operations. In K–12 districts, a business continuity plan can ensure that schools can maintain essential functions and continue operations with minimal disruptions after an emergency, cyberattack or other potentially disastrous event.
KEEP READING: Data policies and strong backups ensure continued information security.
Albany Conducts Research and Analysis of Current Processes
While district leaders are familiar with the needs and requirements of their organization, they opted to simplify the planning process by partnering with a third party.
“We have an amazing partnership with CDW, and we have worked together for over 20 years,” Wyld says. “When the topic of continuity planning came up in our weekly meeting, our reps explained how they could help and how they work with districts all the time on continuity planning.”
Together, the district and the consulting team have completed the first major step of the planning process, a current state analysis. CDW met with stakeholders across the district, including leaders in finance, facilities and maintenance, business operations, communications, human resources, curriculum and instruction, and IT to determine the status quo and set goals.
After completing this research, CDW shared its findings with the district, which included an assessment of business continuity and disaster recovery efforts to date, as well as recommended goals and priorities and a proposed roadmap for furthering the business continuity program.
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“In a lot of areas, continuity plans have already been set up, but they’re not documented and assembled into one big plan, and not everyone knows what their responsibilities are,” Wyld says.
For example, when the elementary school lost internet connectivity, faculty members lost access to copy machines, which they usually activate by scanning their badges. The school created a quick fix by taking the copiers back to manual operations, but that response may not have been documented across the district footprint.
The current state analysis report helped to “show us what we’re doing well, where we’re struggling and what we should think about,” Wyld says. “It even gave us a timeline for what we should achieve in year one, two and three. Business continuity planning is such a huge undertaking, but working with a partner is so helpful. CDW looked at what we had and developed a foundation for us to keep going.”
