Business Continuity Planning to Avoid Disruptions and Interruptions
Every enterprise face a number of disasters that ranges from minor to catastrophic. These disasters can cost enterprises money since disruptions and interruptions lead to lost revenues and additional expenses, which finally results in reduced profits. Besides that, enterprises have to face customer defections as well as loss of reputation and goodwill. This makes it necessary for the implementation of a business continuity plan that is effective enough to cover the occurrence of events such as equipment failure, application failure or corruption of database, malicious software attack, hacking or other internet attacks, social unrest or terrorist attacks, disruption of power supply or telecommunication, natural disasters, fire, and human error, sabotage or strike.
Wikipedia defines Business Continuity Planning (BCP) as a strategy that “identifies an organization’s exposure to internal and external threats and synthesizes hard and soft assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, while maintaining competitive advantage and value system integrity”. Simply put, BCP is a collection of documents, procedures and instructions that help businesses to respond proactively to accidents, disasters, and emergencies so that business operations do not face any disruptions or interruptions.
The BCP process comprises of 6 key stages namely
· Project Initiation
In this phase, business continuity objective and policies are defined and drawn up.
· Business Analysis
In this phase, risk analysis and business impact analysis are performed. Then different business continuity strategies are identified and after performing cost-benefit analysis, the best strategy is selected. The budget for the BCP is also developed in this phase.
· Design and Development of the Business Plan
This phase involves the development of backup and recovery strategies, scenarios to execute plan, and escalation, notification and plan activation criteria.
· Implementation or Creating the plan
This phase involves the preparation of Emergency Response Procedures, Command Center Activation Procedures, Detailed Recovery Procedures, Vendors Contracts and Purchase of Recovery Resources and so on.
· Testing
This phase involves the exercise of program, objectives, plans, scenarios and actual exercise plan. In this phase, training and corporate awareness are also taken care of.
· Maintenance or Updating the plan
This phase involves the review and updating of the business plan.
BCP is essential in today’s scenario where the business environment is hypercompetitive and volatile. BCP is easy now as enterprises have the support of business continuity solutions that offers availability and remote access solutions. This helps enterprises to not only have its core business systems up and running but also ensure that its employees always have access to the core systems.
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