Business Continuity Planning

Business continuity planning is the process involved in creating a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company. The plan ensures that personnel and assets are protected and are able to function quickly in the event of a disaster. Recovery strategies for information technology should be developed so technology can be restored in time to meet the needs of the business.

UNDERSTANDING BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING

Business Continuity Planning involves defining all risks that can affect the company’s operations, making it an important part of the organization’s risk management strategy. After determining risks, a plan is developed with the following points:

  • Defining how the risks will affect business
  • Implementing measures to mitigate the risks
  • Testing measures to ensure their efficiency
  • Checking the procedures to make sure that they are up to date

A business continuity plan for key processes has three main characteristics:

  • High availability: Develop such capability so that a business has access to applications regardless of local failures, whether these failures are in the physical facilities or in the IT hardware or software.
  • Continuous operations: Insure possibility to continue work during a disruption, as well as during planned outages or maintenance.
  • Disaster recovery: Determine how to recover the datacenter at a different site if a disaster destroys or otherwise disrupts the primary site.

WHY IS BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING IMPORTANT?

Companies are exposed to a variety of risks that can be either minor or catastrophic. The main purpose of Business Continuity Planning is to ensure that the business continues to operate if any risk materializes. Any business interruption can result in lost income and increased costs, resulting in a drop in profitability. In this case, the company cannot rely only on insurance, because it will not save all costs and customers who go to competitors. Having a business continuity plan in place can minimize downtime and achieve sustainable improvements in business continuity, IT disaster recovery, corporate crisis management capabilities and regulatory compliance.

KEY FEATURES OF AN EFFECTIVE BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING

We can help to define the main components of business continuity plan:

  • Strategy: define strategy of your business to perform daily operations in continuous way
  • Organization: define structure, skills, communications and responsibilities of employees
  • Applications and data: define necessary software for business operations and ways to ensure high availability of implementation of that software
  • Processes: define objects that are related to the critical business process necessary to run the business, as well as the IT processes used to ensure smooth operations
  • Technology: define systems, network and specific technology needed to ensure continuous work and backups for applications and data
  • Facilities: define objects to provide a disaster recovery site if the primary site is destroyed

If you have any questions about developing a strategy plan and tactics of action in the event of a crisis, just contact us.

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