What is Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a text that describes how a business will continue to operate during an unplanned service interruption. It is more comprehensive than a disaster recovery plan. It contains contingencies for business processes, assets, human resources and business partners, in other words, all aspects of the business that can affect.
A business continuity plan for critical applications and processes has three main aspects:
High Availability: Providing the capability and processes for a business to access applications regardless of local failures. These errors can occur in business processes, physical resources, or IT hardware or software.
Continuous operations: Protect the ability to keep things running during an outage and plan outages, such as schedule backups or upkeep.
Disaster Recovery: Establish a way to recuperate a data centre to a different site if a disaster destroys the primary site or renders it inoperable.
Evolution of Business Continuity Plans
Business continuity planning grew out of disaster recovery planning in the early 1970s—financial organizations, such as banks and insurance companies, invested in alternative sites. Backup tapes were stored in secure locations away from systems.
Recovery efforts were nearly always triggered by a fire, flood, storm, or other physical destruction. Commercial recovery sites offering shared computer services grew in the 1980s, but the emphasis remained solely on IT recovery.
Why is a Business Continuity Plan so Important?
It is vital to have a business continuity plan to identify and address resiliency synchronization between business processes, applications and IT infrastructure. According to IDC, an infrastructure failure can cost $100,000 per hour, and a critical application failure can cost between $500,000 and $1 million per hour.
To resist and thrive during these many threats, businesses have realized they need to do more than build a reliable infrastructure to support growth and protect data. Companies are now emerging holistic business continuity plans that can keep their business running, safeguard data, safeguard the brand, retain customers and ultimately help reduce total operating costs in the long run.
Key Features of an Effective Business Steadiness Plan (BCP)
The mechanisms of business continuity are:
Strategy: substances related to the process used by the company to carry out daily activities, guaranteeing the continuity of operations
Organization: things related to the structure, skills, communications and responsibilities of your employees
Applications and data: objects related to the software necessary to enable business operations, as well as the method of providing high availability used to implement said software
Processes: Objects related to the fundamental business processes necessary for the company’s operation, as well as the IT processes used to ensure smooth operation.
Technology: Objects related to systems, networks, and industry-specific technology required to enable continuous operations and backup of applications and data
Facilities: Objects related to provisioning a disaster recovery site if the primary site destroy.
The business continuity plan becomes a reference source for a business continuity event or crisis. Is the model of strategy and tactics to deal with the event or problem.
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Initial Concepts of Business Continuity Plan
We have had the opportunity to provide training for many years on Business Continuity (BC) issues. One of the first problems that those responsible for implementing this program say they have is that Senior. Its Management is not clear about the BC’s objective. This is further aggravating when the person responsible does not know how to explain it.
That is why it is crucial to clarify the expectations of Senior Management. For this, we want to return to some of the concepts that the ISO 22301 standards for business continuity or ISO 22316 for organizational resilience define :
Business Continuity is the organization’s ability to continue delivering its products or services at previously established acceptable levels after an interruption event. It is usually activated in response to events that threaten the organisation’s viability.
Business Continuity Management is the comprehensive management process that identifies potential threats to an organization. Its the impacts on business operations that those threats could cause. I realized and provides a framework for building organizational resilience. With the ability to provide an adequate response. Is that safeguard the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and activities that create value?
Business Continuity Program is the continuous management and governance process supported by Senior Management and with adequate resources to implement and maintain business continuity management.
The business Continuity Management System is part of the organization’s overall system that establishes, operates, monitors, reviews, maintains and improves business continuity.
Organizational Resilience is the ability of an organization to absorb and adapt to a changing environment.
Stages of the Business Continuity Life Cycle
According to the BCI Good Practice Guide (GBP), the life cycle of Business Continuity Management is made up of 6 phases, also called Business Continuity Professional Practices. These phases are:
Program Policy and Management. It is the practice that establishes the organizational policy with NC. It defines how the policy will implement through a continuous cycle of activities. Within the NC program and calls for action, support and commitment from top management.
Integration: ” awareness ” also defines how to integrate NC awareness and training into everyday activities as part of the organizational culture.
Analysis: Reviews and assesses the organization to identify its goals, how it functions, and the constraints of its operating environment. The most used analysis technique is the BIA, Business Impact Analysis or Business Impact Analysis (for its acronym in English).
Design: In this stage, appropriate solutions are identified and select to achieve continuity of operations in the face of a significant event. These solutions must satisfy the requirements specified in the analysis stage.
Implementation: In this professional practice, the solutions establish in the design stage implement. This implementation achieves through “continuity plans” that meet the requirements and solutions. If previously identified and define in the analysis and design stages.
Validation: At this stage, the effectiveness of the NC program confirm. The objective is to ensure that the continuity strategies respond to the size. Its complexity and type of organization to which they belong and that the plans are precise, effective, complete and timely update. And also, continuous program improvement process should create.
Roles and Responsibilities for Business Continuity Plan
As we saw in the preceding section, the first of the 6 phases of the Business Continuity Management life cycle is the “Program Policy and Management”. Part of this process should be the “assignment of roles and responsibilities” and the identification. Of people with authority to manage the NC program.
This will ensure that the tasks require to implement and maintain the NC program assign to competent resources whose performance. It can periodically evaluate. Below we share some guiding responsibilities of two essential roles within the program.
Conclusion
According to Rodrigo Ferrer, in the Business Continuity Management Methodology document. If business continuity “seeks to sustain critical business products and services. If at previously defined and accepted levels through the structuring of procedures, technology and information. Which develop, compile and maintain in preparation for use during and after an interruption or disaster.
And also, it to protect the interests of stakeholders, reputation, finances, critical assets and other value-creating aspects “. In general, it concept relate to planning to survive in the face of a materialise disaster or risk. In turn, to planning to restore the company’s activities.
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