How do you ensure IT operations continuity and resilience in a crisis?

1 Assess your IT risks

The first step to ensure IT operations continuity and resilience is to identify and evaluate the potential threats and vulnerabilities that could affect your IT infrastructure, applications, systems, and data. You can use various tools and frameworks, such as risk matrices, SWOT analysis, or ISO 31000, to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment. You should also consider the impact and likelihood of each risk, as well as the existing controls and mitigation strategies.

3 Implement your IT safeguards

The third step is to implement the necessary safeguards and measures to protect your IT operations from a crisis. This may involve enhancing your IT security and compliance, upgrading your IT hardware and software, leveraging cloud and virtualization technologies, establishing backup and recovery systems, creating redundancy and failover capabilities, and automating and streamlining IT processes.

4 Monitor your IT performance

The fourth step is to monitor and measure your IT performance and service quality during and after a crisis. You should use various tools and metrics, such as service level agreements (SLAs), key performance indicators (KPIs), or dashboards, to track and evaluate your IT operations. You should also collect and analyze feedback from your customers, stakeholders, and employees to identify and address any issues or gaps.

5 Review your IT lessons

The fifth step is to review and learn from your IT experience and outcomes in a crisis. You should conduct a post-crisis analysis and report that summarizes what went well and what went wrong, the root causes and contributing factors, the impacts and consequences, the best practices and recommendations, as well as the action items and improvement plans.

6 Update your IT strategy

The sixth and final step is to update and align your IT strategy with your organizational goals and priorities in the post-crisis environment. You should review and revise your IT vision, mission, objectives, and roadmap to reflect the changes and opportunities that emerged from the crisis. You should also communicate and collaborate with your customers, stakeholders, and employees to ensure that your IT strategy meets their needs and expectations.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?