Prevention, protection and reaction are your three allies in drawing up your business contingency plan, i.e. the set of tasks that will enable your organisation to recover from an incident in a timeframe that does not compromise any key processes. This ensures a planned response, which impacts on your company's image and reputation, while mitigating the economic impact and loss of critical data.

This roadmap must be built on essential pillars such as productivity, compliance, safety and employees. In addition, their movements will help you detect potential threats that you will have to anticipate and make quick decisions to avoid wasting even a second. Similarly, each department should follow the same steps to manage tasks. It’s the only way for your company to move forward at the same speed.

In this sense, Gartner ensures that having a contingency plan is beneficial, since interruption to your business can be avoided. In this strategy, the Human Resources department, which is responsible for the well-being and physical, emotional and mental performance of employees, and the IT area, which looks after the well-being of the technology platforms, both have a lot to say.

In this new normality many challenges are put on the table. One of the most important is remote working. The pandemic has transformed offices. Due to health measures they have to maintain certain safety distances which means that they cannot accommodate as many people as before. In addition, a significant number of employees have to reconcile their working and personal lives, so remote working is there for them.

It is clear that this hybrid mode is here to stay. The figures prove it. By 2030, demand for remote work will increase by 30% as Generation Z becomes fully employed, and 80% of American workers say they would refuse a job that did not offer flexible work, according to Forbes. In addition, 85% of companies say productivity has increased as a result of greater flexibility.

Therefore, one of the challenges is the IT shadow, already a major problem for IT departments when employees used to share the same physical office, but now with the current situation it is increasing even more, as workers use both corporate and personal devices to download any software they need for the development of their tasks, without asking the corresponding department for permission.

When leaving the coveted security perimeter, the IT department will also have to keep a close eye on all solutions and devices to shield this new way of working. Until the arrival of the pandemic, contingency plans were based on recovery from data centre failures, not on staff management. Now, the scenario is broader and companies need to take a step forward in Digital Transformation in order to combat the next crisis, while continuing to drive growth and employee productivity.

So that everything moves in the right direction, you have to have visibility. In this area, the international consultancy firm SilverStorm offers you all the tools to manage the process from start to finish, from risk identification to contingency plan simulations, to implementation and coordination between departments. It should not be forgotten that communication plays an essential role.