What Does a Business Continuity Plan Typically Include?
Business continuity is about a company’s propensity to maintain its functions during a crisis. A business continuity plan involves establishing essential risk management processes to prevent disruption of services and help the organisation resume full functions.
The plan accounts for unpredictable risks, including pandemics, natural calamities, fires, and cyberattacks. And in an era where service downtimes are unacceptable, a business continuity plan is critical for any organisation. Here’s more about business continuity planning and why it’s important.
Importance of a Business Continuity Plan
It’s vital to develop a business continuity plan as it helps you achieve synchrony of vital business functions, IT infrastructure, and applications. According to statistics, infrastructure failure can cost businesses about $100,000 per hour, while critical application mishaps can cost up to $ 1 million.
To withstand the aftermath of business threats, organisations need more than basic infrastructure to ensure seamless support and foster continuous growth. Most businesses rely on comprehensive continuity plans to keep the business running, protect the brand, safeguard data, and retain customers. A good plan can minimise downtimes and achieve sustainability, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance.
However, developing the appropriate business continuity plan can be daunting due to systems integration and distribution across multiple platforms, thus creating complexities. Having all your systems linked together can ensure seamless operations, but it has its challenges. Of course, restoring IT capabilities is critical for any company, and there are various IT recovery options. However, you need to consider all the other business functions and processes.
Business continuity plans should account for all the potential disruptions that are likely to happen. The plan helps the organisation maintain operations during the crisis and maintain resiliency and respond promptly to any disruption. When creating your continuity plan, you should study your organisation and determine key weaknesses that make you vulnerable. Also, the increasing regulations make it necessary to consider all the regulations that can impact your business.
Potential Threats Analysis and Staff Responsibilities Matrix
Business continuity planning starts with a comprehensive analysis of potential threats that could impact your organisation. The process involves looking into events like access to business assets, natural calamities, and global pandemics.
After understanding all the business risks, determine the skill set of your staff and build a list of team members and describe the exact tasks they’re responsible for should an emergency arise. Clear instructions detailing what each member is responsible for in the face of an overwhelming threat help the team act quickly without wasting time to delegate critical roles.
Emergency Contact Details and Disaster Recovery Teams
It’s essential to maintain an updated list of vital contact information and how to reach them if communication protocols are compromised. The list includes people charged with various tasks in your continuity plan like team members, company heads, emergency service providers, and utility companies.
Next, you need to build resourceful disaster recovery teams that will carry out the most vital portions of the continuity plan. The teams will restore normal business operations after minimising the threat impacts.
Offside Backup, Communication Strategies, and Alternative Power Options
It is critical to have several copies of company data in secure offsite locations. In case of a disaster, security breach, or equipment glitches, you may not have immediate access to primary backups to restore business operations. The business continuity plan should have updated details of the data backups and instructions about how the recovery team can access the backup.
Typically, physical threats like equipment glitches and natural disasters can disrupt electricity in your business. Therefore, it would be best to have power alternatives like generators or solar power to facilitate the restoration of normal business functions as your team works on the breakdown. Also, every company should evaluate the economic impacts of installing power backup solutions and determine if the backup will be ideal in various emergency scenarios.
Communication is essential in every business, but threats can compromise the usual mode of communication. As such, the recovery plan should create a clear picture of how the teams will keep in touch should the primary communication channels become unavailable.
Alternative Location of Business Operations With Backup Access to Resources
Some business threats can compromise your primary location of operations, making it inaccessible for normal operations. Therefore, you should plan for an alternative location in your business continuity plan. You can rent temporary locations, have your staff work from home, or establish a hot site to transfer critical operations.
Restoring normal business functions depends on how quickly you can access proprietary applications. The business continuity plan should have a clear strategy of how to switch to secondary software amid a disaster and revert back once the issues are solved.
Bottom Line
A business continuity plan is essential for a robust incident response strategy. But since businesses have unique differences, your plan may be different. It’s best to take the time to evaluate your organisation and establish a plan that suits your risk factors and unique needs.