You probably already know that having a viable business continuity plan is good practice. A good plan will keep you going when disaster strikes and help you get back to business as usual quickly.
However, creating a business continuity plan takes time and resources, and it’s not a one-time investment; they need to be reviewed and updated regularly. It’s easier to pretend an emergency won’t happen than it is to plan for a possibility. Executives might rather ignore the possible threats than invest resources into business continuity.
Making the case for business continuity
How can you convince your superiors that it’s worth the time and energy? Talk about the money. A recent study found that having a business continuity plan and a chief information security officer can shrink the cost of a data breach.
The cost of a data breach
If your organization collects and stores data, is there anything more eminent than a data breach? There’s been a 12 percent year-to-year increase in security events, and they aren’t getting any cheaper. The cost of responding to and containing a data breach is up 15 percent to $3.5 million dollars.
Mitigating the risks with business continuity
According to the 2014 Cost of Data Breach Study: United States, having a CISO in place and a business continuity plan increased organization response time and reduced the cost of a data breach by $13 per record. With the average number of records affected by a breach reaching upwards of 29,000, that $13 per record adds up quickly.
The report also noted that the time to have a business continuity plan and a strong CISO is before the event takes place. Having a strong security posture going into a breach will significantly help your organization recover from one quickly and with less expense.
Working together is key to reducing the cost and time your organization will need to spend cleaning up after a data breach. You need to have teams working together; your business continuity team needs to be working with your information security team. In the information age, it’s all connected, and your security teams need to collaborate to improve security posture and reduce incident response time.
Your organization will find many benefits when your teams come out of their silos and collaborate, and when it comes to the bottom line, it’ll save you money.
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