What does a Business Continuity Plan Typically Include?

Did you know that 93% of companies who fail to have a business continuity plan and who suffer a major data disaster are out of business within one year? Additionally, 96% of companies with a trusted disaster and recovery plan were able to survive such attacks and get back to business almost immediately.

A business continuity plan is a plan that allows for contingencies such as natural disasters, virus attacks, or any loss of access to the critical infrastructure of a business.

Assessing Threats and Risks

Your continuity plan needs to include everything that could possibly attack the infrastructure of your business to allow for any event that might negatively impact your general operations. The goal is to prevent IT downtime that would naturally occur from such an attack. The attack can be deliberate or it may be accidental. Intention doesn’t matter but getting the business back in working order is the focus.

Secondly, you must have a plan that preserves important data that is central to your business. The data might also include sensitive information that belongs to your clients and customers. Because your credibility is at stake, you must take the time to secure any data that could be used in a negative way and shut down any systems that are vulnerable.

Why does your Company Need a BCP?

A business continuity plan is sometimes referred to as a “disaster recovery plan” because it allows for the preservation of critical data and other elements of your business. Having a good contingency plan ensure you that downtime is limited to the minimum amount of time needed to get it back up and running. Protection of data is the other aspect of this. You must make sure that your customers’ data is safe and secure and it usually involves putting it in a remote location or a SkyDrive outside of your location in which the disaster occurred.

Benefits of a Disaster Plan and Recovery Strategies

The general goal of a disaster or business continuity plan is to improve the level of responsiveness by employees in different situations that might interfere with the daily operations of your business.

Like preparing for disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes, or other events that are unpredictable, a disaster plan or business continuity plan requires all members to be on board to make it work efficiently.

Emergency Management Plan

Not only should a business have a disaster plan, but they should have the continuity plan outlined succinctly in a place where everyone has access to it. It should be required reading for all executives, employees, and other staff members that work within the facility where the business is operated. Additionally, you should have assigned specific jobs and responsibilities to staff members who will be responsible for various actions in the event of an emergency.

1. Initiate the project – During this stage you will outline the goal of your business continuity plan and decide who will do what and when in the event of an emergency. You will start the project by considering all the resources you have and how you will store data and take care of the little things that preserve critical data points and other important assets.

2. Information-gathering phase – In this phase you will get information and data that applies to your situation planning for a possible emergency or disaster and do a business impact analysis and a risk assessment. In other words, during this stage, you are looking at the worst case scenario and predicting how much downtime you might experience from a disaster such as a cyber-attack, storm outage, or loss of connection that may result in lost files or data.

3. Planned development – In this stage you will plan how you are going to carry out your business continuity plan and how you will recover from a possible disaster by using all the resources you have available. Your plan development could be in the shape of a pyramid with the top being business continuity which is a state of full operations, risk management under that, and Information Technology recovery near the bottom. You will utilize your server storage and network to serve as a backup strategy so that you will always have your data in the event of such an emergency situation.

4. Plan testing maintenance and updating – In this stage, you will plan and test out some of the important aspects of your disaster plan. You may want to back up and make some changes that will allow you to stay current and to make sure your plan is going to work on all levels. You need to rehearse an unplanned event and go through a drill much like you would have fire or tornado drill to make sure everything works as planned. If you find it lacking, you should evaluate the effectiveness of your plan and how it fits areas that need improving.

Read More –  what does business continuity plan