Ensuring a high level of sustainability of the organization is one of the key management tasks. In this article, we will consider the basis of the business continuity plan template.
What is Business Continuity Planning?
Business Continuity Planning is a process involved in creating a system to prevent and recover from potential threats to a company. The plan provides protection for personnel and assets and the ability to function quickly in the event of a disaster. The BCP program is usually planned in advance and involves input from key stakeholders and staff.
BCP identifies any risks that may affect a company’s operations, making it an important part of an organization’s risk management strategy. Risks can include natural disasters – fire, floods, or weather-related events – and cyberattacks. Once the risks have been identified, the plan should also include:
- Determining how these risks will affect transactions
- Implement safeguards and procedures to reduce risks
- Testing procedures to ensure their operation
- Review the process to make sure it is relevant
Business continuity means maintaining key business functions or quickly resuming them in the event of a major disruption caused by fire, flood, or cyber-attack. The business continuity plan allows you to identify and synchronize the balance between current work processes and the installed IT infrastructure.
Parts of BCP
There are three main properties of BCP:
- Care should be taken to be able to access vital data and applications regardless of local failures. Many companies use external business continuity management consulting services. In particular, there are proactive services such as IBM IT Infrastructure Recovery Services that help identify risks and ensure that an internal system is detected, responded and recovered after a failure.
- Continuity of operations. Protect your company’s ability to keep up with disruptions and planned outages through tools such as scheduled backups or maintenance.
- Disaster recovery. Set up your company’s data center at a different site if an accident disrupted or otherwise disabled the primary site. With the rise of cyber attacks, many firms are moving from manual recovery to an automated resiliency approach.
Stages of building a business continuity plan
The proposed methodology for constructing a business continuity plan contains three main stages:
- Risk analysis of adverse events. Briefly, this block can be characterized by the question: “What can happen?” At the output of this block, a table should be generated with the main threats and corresponding risks for each IT asset;
- Measures to reduce risks. Briefly, this block can be characterized by the question: “What needs to be done so that risks do not occur?” The output of this block should be developed a list of planned measures to reduce the likelihood of unfavorable risks events;
- Recovery activities. Briefly, this block can be characterized by the question: “What to do if the risk has come?” At the exit of this block, a plan should be developed measures to restore services in the event of an adverse event, with writing work instructions and procedures for each situation and for each threat.