Business Continuity - A Mini Guide - Bizzlibrary

1. Business Continuity - A Mini Guide What Is Business Continuity? Business continuity is the ability to maintain operations despite disruptions. Natural disasters and other emergencies can disrupt normal business activities, causing damages and losses. Business continuity planning prevents these incidents from becoming major problems by ensuring that your business plans and processes are resilient enough to continue operating after such events occur. Why Do You Need Business Continuity Plan? Business continuity planning is essential for every company regardless of its size or industry. Even if your company does not have any physical assets or inventory, it still needs a plan for keeping its operations running smoothly in the aftermath of an event that affects the entire region or country where it operates. BCP aims to minimize any disruption or damage caused by unexpected events such as natural disasters, human error or sabotage, equipment failure, and other crises. Also, business

2. continuity planning (BCP) ensures that your business can recover from a disruption that might occur at any time. Although, developing a business continuity plan is difficult as the business operations are increasingly interrelated and integrated. But, the business continuity plan template is available online to outline how a business will continue operating during an unplanned service disruption. It is more comprehensive than a disaster recovery plan. IT Business Continuity Planning Lifecycle Business continuity planning is a series of steps that help you prepare for the unexpected. It is a process that can help you survive disasters, including natural disasters and cyberattacks. The IT sector is most vulnerable to external threats. Also, it is one sector that contains most of the data. As a result of which, it is essential to analyze the lifecycle of the business continuity plan for the IT department. Creating a plan regarding business continuity is a systematic approach to identifying, analyzing, and mitigating risks to an organization’s ability to continue doing business. The following are four key phases of business continuity planning: 1. Risk Assessment: Identify your most significant risks by gathering information about your company's assets and vulnerabilities, as well as its competitors' assets and vulnerabilities. 2. Business Impact Analysis: Conduct a cost-benefit analysis that determines how much it would cost if the organization were to go out of business or lose access to critical information systems for any given amount of time due to various types of disasters or disruptions. 3. Contingency Planning: Create plans for responding to various types of disruptions that could affect your operations or facilities (for example, fire, earthquake, and flood). Develop plans for each scenario based on your risk assessment findings so that you know what steps to take in case of an emergency at work. 4. Execute Plans: Execute the already created plans and distribute them to all the departments. It is good to monitor and record your action plan to have an idea about response & recovery time during the actual incidents. Lastly, carry out annual reviews of all the plans. To conclude, business continuity is the ability to recover from a disaster and resume operations, often in a limited capacity while undergoing repairs or replacement of damaged facilities. The term may also refer to efforts made to prevent such disasters. For More Information: https://www.bizzlibrary.com/