Business Continuity Plan.

Business Continuity Plan.

Business Continuity Plan.

 

All the businesses may need a continuation plan of a certain level. Business Continuity Plan for small business may need not to be comprehensive and encompass all the aspects, but the enterprise level businesses must have such a plan. Business Continuity Plan is more comprehensive than that of Disaster Recovery and contains the eventualities of all stakeholders that may impact the business at any level. These may include processes, assets, and people (human resources or even business partners).

By definition, the Business Continuation Plan (BCP) is a document that contains every aspect of how the business will run or recover from any outage, in case of any service disruption. The service disruption may be due to any physical threat like extreme weather conditions, fire eruption at a site, earthquake, or technology like the cyber-attacks.

 

Characteristic of a BCP:

The main characteristic of any BCP is that it must be comprehensive, realistic, efficient, and robust. The comprehensive nature will identify every aspect and the dependencies for running the business. It must be realistic as the mainstream business continuity is dependent on it. It should not include or encompass anything that is not viable for the business. Like small businesses may not need any DR site as the cost of establishing DR sites may supersede the annual turnover of the business. It must be efficient enough to avoid an outage or at least may resume the business within a short time. The robustness will enable any business to evolve or implement any plan in the changing circumstances.

 

Benefits:

The benefits of having a BCP may save a lot of revenue for the businesses. When the business continues, the revenue will be generated without a gap. The most important aspect of any business is potential customers. By having a proper BCP, any business can win customer’s confidence that in turn lead to business growth. When any business claims a brand name, then the brand reputation may be one of the biggest assets for their owners. They may go hundreds of miles out of the way to save their brand reputation. Having a good BCP may secure this aspect too.

 

Steps of creating a BCP:

To create a complete BCP, one should go through several steps. These may be:

1- Business Impact Analysis (BIA):

  • This analysis identifies the most critical and time-sensitive business processes and functions. How important or critical a function is, for running the business.

2- Outage Recovery Scheme:

  • The strategy will identify and implement the measures that must be taken to resume the most critical business functions and processes.

3- Building a BCP Team:

  • There must be a proper team that can manage, evolves, and monitor all the activities as per the BCP document.

4- Team’s Training:

  • Training of the BCP team and the orientation exercises may help to evaluate the BCP. The results of these exercises may identify any gap in the plan that can be updated accordingly.

 

Conclusion:

Having a comprehensive BCP may prevent big losses in terms of revenue, customer confidence, and defacement of brand reputation.

 

 

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