Business Continuity Planning for 2022

Last year, we released an article detailing some of the best ways to prepare your businesses and facilities for 2021. As 2021 comes to a close, now is the time to reflect on how our Business Continuity Planning helped us address unexpected situations, as well as identify ways we can improve while going into the new year. Throughout this entire year, most of us continued to deal with consequences from the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of businesses and facilities were still not able to staff at appropriate levels and supply chain issues have left others with unprecedented lead times.  

Business Continuity, Business Resilience and Risk Management are all terms that have consistently remained extremely crucial for businesses, organizations and facilities that want to protect their employees, customers, property, assets and business reputation. Gartner Group estimates that the average cost of business downtime is $5,600 per minute, which equals over $300,000 per hour. You can calculate the cost to your own organization using our free Downtime Calculator. If saving time, money, resources and your reputation is at all important to you, you should have a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan in place to address any and all unexpected disruptions that may occur in 2022.

Environment Monitoring As Business Continuity

Business Continuity covers a wide range of subcategories but one that is too often overlooked is environment monitoring. Environment monitoring works by overseeing the environmental conditions within your business or facility. Factors such as temperature, humidity, flood, power and smoke account for roughly 30% of all business downtime. With proactive environment monitoring measures in place, you can stay in the know. If the temperature is rising in your data center, or a pipe is leaking in the basement, or the power unexpectedly goes out, then environment monitoring will notify you of that change so you can address it before disaster strikes. Environment monitoring will contribute to your Business Continuity efforts by 

• Preventing data loss and downtime 
• Improving employee and customer wellness 
• Reducing inventory loss and damage
• Limiting physical damage to facilities
• Increasing cybersecurity and physical security
• Protecting against extreme weather conditions 

Environment monitoring is critical to effective Business Continuity planning because without it, you are not protected from all of the costly damage and downtime that comes from extreme heat and humidity, flooding, fires, power outages, security breaches and more. 

As we get ready to enter the new year, we should anticipate any and all challenges that might be thrown our way. With Environment Monitoring and Business Continuity tools in place, you will be prepared to take on 2022 with confidence.  

Business Continuity should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind as we prepare to enter a new year that will bring new challenges and uncertainty. For more information about how your business can best approach proactive planning for 2022, check out our additional articles.