All About BCP
A Guide to Solid BCP
What Composes a Solid BCP?
A solid BCP begins with identifying and mitigating high-risk threats in the Risk Assessment. The basis of all planning rests on the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), which provides a basis for ALL recovery strategy development by mapping a prioritization of all critical business activities that must be operational following a disaster, along with the critical information technology and personnel resources that support them.
The Risk Assessment:
- Determines threats to your people, facilities, and IT infrastructure
- Identifies operational vulnerabilities and poor business processes
- Provides cost-effective mitigation strategies to reduce the threat probability or impact
The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) helps organizations:
- Understand normal business operations and how IT resources and people support them
- Prioritize critical business activities, IT resources, and people
- Provide the baseline blueprint for business recovery strategies
After determining your organization’s risk factors and critical business functions, you can start developing your response and recovery plans. A comprehensive BCP is comprised three elements that work together to help you respond to a disaster and quickly resume operations.
- The Business Recovery Plan provides step-by-step work-around procedures for operating critical business functions with the least reliance on people and IT under any post-disaster circumstances. This is your plan to continue providing your products/services to your customers while your facilities/IT/personnel/operations infrastructure are being repaired. You will use the pre-positioned resources detailed in this plan to resume your critical operations as quickly as possible after a disaster (thus reducing/eliminating quantitative/qualitative downtime impacts.)
- The Crisis Management Plan provides a step-by-step action plan for facility and people-related issues and provides for safety of personnel at all work sites. This plan provides the groundwork for decision-making during a disaster and establishes overall command and control of the response, recovery, and restoration effort. Notification of recovery resources, alternate operating facilities, and safety procedures are additional core parts of the Crisis Management Plan.
- The IT Disaster Recovery Plan maps out step-by-step procedures to restore critical IT resources, including hardware, electronic and hard copy data, applications, equipment, telecommunications, and supplies. Particular focus should be given on IT resources that support critical business activities across the organization.
Have you started building a plan? Confused about where to start building? Contact a Strategic BCP representative to get some answers about your situation.