So, why should an SMB (small to medium sized business) care about Business Continuity Planning (BCP)?

Usually BCP work is the purview of large, Fortune 1000 companies that have ample resources and quite a bit to lose. Most of them, being publicly traded would stand to go out of business if their business was sufficiently disrupted. At the very least, public / customer opinion and confidence of the company would nosedive if the company could not recover from a disaster. So what about smaller companies? Should they be as concerned about BCP and Disaster Recovery (DR)? I say that an SMB cannot live without at least some business continuity plans!

Here's why: For most smaller companies, the business is owned by a single person or group of partners. In the majority of those cases, the business is the sole source of income for that person or persons and is the largest asset owned! If that business is disrupted, that person's largest asset could be destroyed along with the main source of income.

The issue with most SMB's is that they either feel that BCP is too expensive or that they have sufficient insurance to cover their losses. Both of these issues I will address in a later post.

To start with though, here is a link to some of the best freeware and shareware backup tools available. If your SMB is not doing backups of your data (which falls under the "Vital Records" category) then you are in danger. At these prices (sometimes free) you cannot afford to NOT backup your data. It's a great place to get started with some piece of mind...

KB the BCP Guy.