WHAT is it: A Business Continuity Plan refers to maintaining business functions or quickly resuming them in the event of a major disruption of work or when a team member is out of office. A business continuity plan outlines procedures and instructions an organization must follow; it covers business processes, assets, human resources, business partners and more.
HOW it works: If your organization doesn't have a Business Continuity Plan in place, start by assessing your business processes, determining which areas are vulnerable, and the potential losses if those processes go down for a day, a few days, or a week.
Next, develop a plan that 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.
WHY execute the process: It's important to have a business continuity plan in place to identify and address resiliency synchronization between business processes, applications, and IT infrastructure. To withstand and thrive during these many threats, businesses have realized that they need to do more than create a reliable infrastructure that supports growth and protects data.
Companies are now developing holistic business continuity plans that can keep your business up and running, protect data, safeguard the brand, retain customers and ultimatelv helo reduce total operating costs over the long term. 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.
BENEFIT OUTCOME: A business continuitv plan (BCP) is a document that outlines how a business will continue operating during an unplanned disruption in service. This is extremely important and beneficial because it becomes a source reference at the time of a business continuity event or crisis and the blueprint for strategy and tactics to deal with the event or crisis.