Developing strategies for business growth is a cornerstone of the modern organisation. Developing strategies to help avoid business loss is just as important, which means business continuity plans are critical. These documents provide detailed plans on how to keep essential operations running during an emergency in order to minimise losses. Some organisations call these documents "disaster recovery plans." Others use this term to refer to department-level recovery plans and use the term "business continuity plan" when discussing organisation-wide plans. These organisations will have one business continuity plan and several disaster recovery plans. Regardless of the terminology that your company uses, you need a system in place for getting through a crisis. Here are four steps for creating a business continuity plan: 1. Perform a Business Impact Analysis The first step in creating a business continuity plan is to perform a business impact analysis. To begin, list the processes that you use to deliver your products and services to customers. Then, catalog the resources needed to power those processes. The resources often include employees, business partners, office buildings, IT infrastructure and other technology assets, and office supplies. After completing this inventorying process, ask yourself how a crisis would impact your business. If a critical disk failure causes you to lose a week's worth of work, would you still be able to deliver your products and services? If a fire destroys your building or your computer system fails, how long would you be able to function without it? To answer questions like these, you need to find out how long you would be able to operate in an emergency if you were cut off from your resources. This timeframe is known as the maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPOD). It represents how much time you have to either fix a problem or find an alternative solution. If you are unable to recover in time, you could be held liable for failing to give your customers the service or product that you agreed to provide them. For this reason, you should address legal liabilities and similar issues in your business impact analysis. 2. Prepare Specific Recovery Plans for Employees and Departments Now that you know your MTPOD, you can set a goal for how long it will take you to recover. This is known as the recovery time objective (RTO). With the RTO in mind, you can start writing recovery plans for each department, team, and senior manager in your organisation. These plans must list all the tasks that need to get done in a crisis and assign each task to a specific person. For example, in a plan that relates to a power failure, one employee might have the task of contacting the power company. Another employee might be in charge of checking the backup generator. A third might be responsible for maintaining the lines of communication between team leaders. After they have carried out these tasks, they can move on to the second job on their lists. If your departments contain many employees or intradepartmental groups, make sure that your plans explain the departmental chain of command in an emergency. It is also a good idea to cross-train employees in the emergency tasks. That way, if one person is absent, busy, or incapacitated, a second staff member will be able to take that person's place. Unfortunately, you might not be able to carry out your primary recovery plan because of some unforeseen detail or series of events. This is why you need to create a set of backup recovery plans as well. These secondary plans might assign the tasks to different people or carry out the tasks in a different order. The secondary plans might even have employees perform the tasks from an alternate location in the event that the office is out of commission. 3. Create a Battle Box Battle boxes contain equipment and documents that companies need during emergencies. Your battle box should contain all the documentation for your business continuity plan, as well as the plans for each department and senior manager. Plus, it must include key pieces of information about your company's IT infrastructure, such as product serial numbers. Since communicating during a crisis is important, you also need to include contact information for all your employees and outside partners. While these business-specific items are important, don't forget to include practical items such as a torch, a mobile, a laptop, a first aid kit, and a few bottles of water. For small companies, a single battle box should be fine. If your company is large, you might want to provide battle boxes for each department. 4. Practice for the Real Thing When it comes to your business continuity plan, practice makes perfect. Running crisis simulations as part of your training program will help you determine how well your plan will work in real life. These exercises also let your employees feel what it is like to be in an emergency. That way they will be less likely to panic if an actual crisis occurs. Amazon, AT&T, Google, and Netflix take practice runs to the next level. They often surprise their emergency response teams by performing crisis simulations without any warning. While some businesses have in-house teams run and monitor crisis simulations, many other companies hire Multi IT & Telephony Solutions for this job. Multi records a response team's actions during a simulation, analyse the results after the fact, and offer suggestions about ways to improve the team's reactions. Besides performing emergency response drills, we can help you develop your business continuity plan. Contact Us to find out the ways in which our specialist disaster recovery solutions can help your business.

If you use Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you probably know the keyboard shortcuts to select all (Ctrl+A), copy (Ctrl+C), and paste (Ctrl+V). Did you know there are other helpful keyboard shortcuts that you can use in all three applications? Being able to use the same keyboard shortcuts can make them easier to remember. Here are nine keyboard shortcuts that you can use in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to save time and effort: 1. Ctrl+F Do you need to find all the instances of a certain word, number, or character? Press Ctrl+F (press the Ctrl key and the F key at the same time) to bring up the find feature. 2. Ctrl+H Using the find-and-replace functionality is much faster than manually finding and replacing many instances of a word, number, or character. Use Ctrl+H to access this time-saving tool. 3. Ctrl+Z When you have an "Oops, I didn't want to do that" moment, press Ctrl+Z to reverse your last command or delete the last thing you typed. You can press it multiple times to keep undoing your actions. 4. Ctrl+Y Pressing Ctrl+Y will redo an action that was just undone with Ctrl+Z. You can also use Ctrl+Y to repeat the last action you performed, which is helpful when you want to apply formatting that doesn't have a keyboard shortcut. For example, suppose you want to put the words Pull, Aim, Spray, and Sweep in red to set them apart in some instructions describing how to use a fire extinguisher. After highlighting the word Pull and changing its color to red using the toolbar, you can change the color of the other words by highlighting each word and pressing Ctrl+Y. 5. Ctrl+K Do you want to insert a hyperlink? Press Ctrl+K to bring up the functionality that lets you insert a new hyperlink as well as edit an existing one. 6. F7 Spell checkers are popular, especially among people who know they are spelling-challenged. In Excel and PowerPoint, pressing F7 produces a basic spell checker. In Word, it produces a checker that looks for both spelling and grammatical errors. 7. Ctrl+B Many documents and presentations use bold formatting for titles and headings. In spreadsheets, column headings and totals are often in bold. Use Ctrl+B to quickly apply bold formatting to the elements that need it. This keyboard shortcut can also be used to remove bold formatting. 8. Ctrl+I Italics are useful for emphasizing text and identifying the names of magazines, books, and other publications. Press Ctrl+I to apply or remove italic formatting. 9. Ctrl+U Like italics, underlining is useful for emphasizing text. Use Ctrl+U to apply or remove underlining. With these keyboard shortcuts you will be able to master Microsoft office. Have a look at our Office 365 offering which contains the office you know and love. alternatively please contact us should you wish to find out more.

With cyber threats making international news continually, we've all grown a bit weary and a bit tired of the topic but it doesn't mean that the threat is going away, if anything it is getting worse. A Cyber Security Self Assessment may be the answer you are looking for to get a holistic idea of the current state of your Cyber Security. There's alot of scaremongering in the media but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of practical tips that individuals and businesses can use and implement. So I thought it was about time that something was developed that could help your business identify what level your cyber security protection is at.  Something that you can do yourself and get your IT person to assist with. We're not trying to push a particular product or solution, from our point of view it's all about providing useful information to you to help you protect yourself and your customers. We have developed a cyber security self-assessment that can be downloaded from this web page, reviewed and completed.  It covers different areas of the cyber security landscape that every business should have including - Management and strategy Network security Access controls Protection Staff awareness and training The objective behind the self-assessment is to get you thinking about where the risks are within your own business and what you are doing for protection.  The answer to all questions in the self-assessment should be 'yes' and if you are getting some-one to do the self-assessment for you and answers are not all 'yes' then there should be a justification as to why not. The cyber security self-assessment can be downloaded from the page below: Cyber Security Self Assessment Multi IT & Telephony Solutions are industry leading IT security experts with over 30 years experience. Contact us today for a free security evaluation of your business.