What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan is important because it helps you ensure that your business can continue operating in the event of an emergency. This could be anything from a minor disruption, like a power outage, to a major disaster, like a flood or fire. In an ideal world, you’d never need to use your plan—but if you do need it, it’s good to have one in place.
What is a Business Continuity Plan
Gartner defines Business Continuity Planning as “a broad disaster recovery approach whereby enterprises plan to recover the entire business process. This includes a plan for workspaces, telephones, workstations, servers, applications, network connections and any other resources required in the business process.”
How can it help you?
-Recover from minor disruptions and get back up and running quickly
-Identify who should be evacuated from the building and where they should go
-Respond appropriately if there is a natural disaster or business disruption
-Assess damage and determine whether repairs are feasible
-Protect data integrity by using offline backups
What are the benefits of a business continuity plan?
A business continuity plan is a critical part of any company’s risk management strategy. It gives your company the ability to respond effectively to disruptions, and it helps you maintain your reputation as a reliable service provider.
With a business continuity plan in place, you’ll be able to keep your customers happy even during the service disruption. This means that they’ll keep coming back—and that means more revenue for you!
It also gives employees confidence in their job security and increases productivity by boosting morale. That’s because when staff know a plan is in place, they’re less likely to leave or seek other employment during times of trouble.
Additionally, having a business continuity plan helps ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations—and that’s important when it comes time for audits or other inspections by regulators. Finally, having these plans in place helps ensure that your organization will be prepared for future challenges by providing the necessary resources now, so you don’t have to scramble later on!
What should it include?
You may come across various definitions of business continuity planning but most of them are fairly similar. The basic idea is that it’s a way to keep your business running even when external events affect your ability to do so. It’s about being prepared for whatever might happen and making sure that you can continue to operate as usual even when unexpected things occur.
What are the steps that are needed for business continuity planning?
Business continuity planning is a process of preparation for a disaster that can have a significant impact on the organization. The process involves assessing risks, identifying critical functions, and developing plans for addressing each risk. Take a look at the following examples from CIO and BDC to get a better understanding of what is needed in a business continuity plan.
CIO mentions that business continuity plans must include 6 general steps:
This involves six general steps:
- Identify the scope of the plan.
- Identify key business areas.
- Identify critical functions.
- Identify dependencies between various business areas and functions.
- Determine acceptable downtime for each critical function.
- Create a plan to maintain operations.
BDC, on the other hand, has 8 steps that are more generalized for all industries:
- Establish an Emergency Preparedness team
- Identify essential services/functions
- Identify required skill sets and staff reallocation
- Identify potential issues
- Prepare a plan for each essential service/function
- Compare with your “Preparedness Checklist”
- Review with the emergency preparedness team
- Revise, test and update the plan
How does your business guarantee business continuity?
We know that the only thing worse than a system-wide outage is a complete shift of work-from-home transition, like Covid-19 has impacted the globe. That’s why we ensure that our data centers have the flexibility and scalability to grow on-demand resources, as well as provide remote workers with tools allowing the organization to maintain security standards but, most importantly, allow the day-to-day operations to continue without impacting the bottom line.
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