Business Continuity: How to Prepare and Protect Your Business
DR and BCP are not just about IT/Technology; it is, however, an organisational responsibility, and ultimate accountability sits with the CEO and Board to ensure their business continues to operate in the event of a Disaster. Disasterrecovery.org defines “Business Continuity Plan or BCP as how an organisation guards against future disasters that could endanger its long-term health or the accomplishment of its primary mission.
BCPs take into account disasters that can occur on multiple geographic levels, regional, and national disasters like fires, earthquakes, or pandemic illness. Disaster Recovery is defined as a set of processes or procedures required to enable the recovery of business-critical systems/infrastructure in the event of a disaster, so your DR plans should form part of any Business Continuity Planning.
BCP vs. DR Explained: Key Differences for Business Preparedness
The terms “Business Continuity Plan” (BCP) and “Disaster Recovery Plan” (DRP) are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct roles in ensuring an organisation’s resilience in the face of disruptions. BCP is a comprehensive approach that outlines how a business will continue to operate during and after a disaster, focusing on maintaining essential functions and services. It includes a business impact analysis (BIA), risk assessment, and strategies for continuity, ensuring that critical business processes remain available to customers and stakeholders.
On the other hand, a DR is more specific to the recovery of IT systems and data. It details the steps necessary to restore critical technology and infrastructure after a disaster, ensuring that the organisation can return to normal operations as quickly as possible. This plan includes evaluating backups and redundant systems essential for recovery.
Beyond IT: Company-Wide Business Continuity Planning
Any planning should encompass more than IT/technology and should cover how your systems and supporting infrastructure will be recovered in the event of a disaster. That said, organisational planning must include potential disasters that may or may not include IT, such as a bus crash (for a tour operator) or reputational damage on social media (for a PR agency). A number of likely disaster scenarios must be planned for as part of an organisation’s proposed response to a disaster (a definition of which should also be agreed upon by the organisation).
Each business unit’s Disaster Recovery plan must be included in the overall organisational business continuity planning and, of course, must be supported by the IT/technology plans. In the digital era, where the use of social media by organisations is becoming commonplace, any disaster planning must be included in an organisation’s response to a “social media disaster” such as negative product publicity, which can quickly go viral. A recent example of this is when a US pizza company jumped on a trending hashtag without knowing its full context; in this case, it was referring to domestic violence.
Business Continuity: What’s Included in Your Plan?
Business Continuity Planning is bigger than just IT, but for most organisations, IT and its reliance on technology are huge. Therefore, any planning must include IT and technology recovery as part of the organisation and business unit scenario planning. In previous roles, I focused on IT/technology DR Planning for those critical IT services/systems that were required to support the vital business processes of an organisation and its customers.
The impact of the organizational “loss” should be quantified through the business impact analysis (BIA) involving all aspects of the organisation and must be completed in collaboration with the other business units to decide which systems/infrastructure/people were critical to the running of the organization and in the case of IT systems which order they would be recovered. Not only should you create a DR plan, but you must test, at least annually, using real-life scenarios (example below).
Why Scenario Planning Is Crucial for Preparedness
During the process of completing a BIA, a large number of scenarios will be identified and may cause considerable debate and litigation between the business units. To ensure consistency and clarity I have included some examples of scenarios that would impact an organisation and its ability to provide continued service to its customers. An organisation must agree on these scenarios (to be included in their Business Continuity Planning) as well as on the findings of the BIA. Example scenarios may include:
- Single service or system failure;
- Multiple services or systems failures (concurrently);
- Total loss of the Data Centre services (and its facilities);
- Total devastation of the localised region (e.g. volcanic eruption, tsunami, earthquake, significant loss of life);
- Pandemic management;
- Cloud-hosted solution (SaaS) failure;
- Building evacuation: relocating critical staff or supporting the relocation of critical business staff should a building be inaccessible or due to be evacuated or unusable because of power issues on site.
- Loss of power to a data centre, which could be the company’s own or a hosted environment;
- Supply chain interruption;
- Brand damage is going viral on social media.
- Cybersecurity or data breach event.
Have you struggled to start your Business Continuity Planning?
If you have, try downloading my Business Continuity Plan template by clicking the button below. I have used it successfully on several occasions, so feel free to use as much or as little as you require…just an acknowledgement will do.
Disasters Are Inevitable, Is Your Business Ready?
Disasters happen, be they natural, human-made, on social media or in the cloud. It’s how your organisation is prepared for, and ultimately responds to a disaster that will be the measure of success for any Business Continuity Planning (BCP). Do not delay and get yours in order today, as it could be the difference between being in business or not.
Its how your organization responds to a disaster that will be the measure of success for any Business Continuity Plan
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