Business Continuity
Business continuity means the organisation can keep critical business functions running during and after a disaster or disruption.
It’s about the constant availability of employee and customer facing services, which is more important than ever in today’s digital age with more frequent and severe disruptions.
The aim of business continuity planning process is to maintain brand and employee trust. It requires strategic planning with a plan for the unplanned.
What is Business Continuity
Business continuity means the organisation can keep its critical business functions and processes running during and after a disaster or disruption.
It’s having a plan in place so the organisation can continue to operate with minimal downtime and disruption when the unexpected happens such as natural disasters, cyber attacks or supply chain disruptions.
Business continuity is key to reputation, customer trust and financial stability. By keeping critical business functions running organisations can weather the storm and keep the business going.
Why Business Continuity Planning
Downtime is expensive and messy, business continuity planning is key. Threats that can cause downtime such as cyber attacks and extreme weather are getting worse.
Having a business continuity plan in place means an organisation can keep its critical functions running after an emergency or disruption. Business continuity means the organisation can be resilient and respond quickly to an outage.
Benefits
- Less Downtime and Disruption: A business continuity plan can help reduce the impact of a disaster or disruption, so critical business functions and processes can keep running with minimal interruption.
- Better Customer Satisfaction: By keeping business running during a disaster or disruption an organisation can keep providing products and services to customers and maintain their satisfaction and loyalty.
- Reputation: A business continuity plan can help an organisation maintain its reputation by showing it can respond and recover from the unexpected.
- Financial Stability: By reducing downtime and disruption a business continuity plan can help an organisation maintain its financial stability and avoid big losses.
- Compliance: Many organisations are required to have a business continuity plan in place to comply with regulatory requirements so they meet industry standards and legal obligations.
The 3 elements of business continuity
Resilience: An organisation can build resilience by designing critical functions and infrastructure with multiple disaster scenarios in mind. A business continuity strategy means these critical functions are kept running during and after a disaster.
Recovery: Quick recovery of business functions after a disaster is key after business interruptions during emergency services process.
Contingency: A contingency plan has procedures for multiple external scenarios and can include a command structure that distributes responsibilities within the organisation.
Creating a Business Continuity Plan
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a critical document that outlines an organisation’s critical business processes and systems. It identifies potential disruptions or incidents such as natural disasters, human error and cyber attacks by addressing the components of a business.
A good BCP and comprehensive business continuity plan helps organisations prepare for any threats and protect their reputation and viability of business operations. Key components of a BCP are identifying critical business processes, systems and components.
Business Continuity Management
Business continuity management software is an option to implement business continuity plans. An emergency response plan is also important as it means personnel are prepared to manage crises. It’s important to appoint who will manage the business continuity programme if a business disruption occurs.
Business continuity is an ongoing process and an organisation’s business continuity plan shouldn’t just sit on a shelf. Testing and training is required to keep the plan up to date and relevant.
Industry Standards and Best Practice
The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) provides global business continuity standards and best practice in its Good Practices Guidelines. The International Standards Organisation (ISO) 223XX series covers business continuity and related activities.
A full business continuity plan should include workspace recovery, cyber resilience, change management and more.
Tools and Resources for Business Continuity
Organisations use various methods and tools to implement business continuity plans which are critical to an organisation’s ability to keep critical functions running during an emergency and avoid service interruptions.
These include business continuity management software, business impact analysis, risk assessment, data backup and disaster recovery planning.
A disaster recovery plan is just a part of business continuity planning. Disaster recovery plans are data focused and focus on having data backed up and storing data so it can be easily retrieved after a disaster.
Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery
Business continuity and disaster recovery are often used interchangeably but they are not the same thing. Disaster recovery planning is the process of restoring IT systems and data after a disaster or disruption, business continuity is the broader process of keeping an organisation’s critical business functions and processes running during and after a disaster or disruption.
A disaster recovery plan is a part of a business continuity plan, it focuses on restoring IT systems and data. A business continuity plan takes a more holistic view, it considers all aspects of an organisation’s operations, people, processes and technology.
In summary disaster recovery is a part of business continuity but not the same thing. A full business continuity plan should include a disaster recovery plan and other components such as business impact analysis, risk assessment and emergency response planning.
This means an organization’s ability is prepared to deal with any disruption fully and keep its critical business functions and processes running.
Conclusion
Full business continuity can prevent downtime and is key to recovering from disasters.
Business continuity, business continuity planning, business continuity plan, business continuity management. Together with crisis management plan business continuity important especially during risk assessment exercise of the entire organization technology infrastructure.
Chris Ekai is a Risk Management expert with over 10 years of experience in the field. He has a Master’s(MSc) degree in Risk Management from University of Portsmouth and is a CPA and Finance professional. He currently works as a Content Manager at Risk Publishing, writing about Enterprise Risk Management, Business Continuity Management and Project Management.