Business continuity plan (BCP) is an organizational document that comprises of a critical information that organizations establish to continue operating before, during and after an unplanned outage. A BCP enables an organization to continue serving customers even during emergencies and further helps the organization to build confidence and reputation among its customer base. Moreover, a BCP is a proactive measure and implements a combination of policies, standards, procedures and processes to achieve its goal of minimizing the impact of disruptive event to the business functions.
To achieve the aforementioned objectives and other related goals, the BCP process involves four main steps listed below:
- Project scope and planning: In this phase of the BCP, organizations will perform structured review of businesses, create a BCP team, assess available resources and analyze legal and regulatory requirements.
- Business impact analysis (BIA): In this step an organization will identify the business processes and tasks that are considered critical to the existence of an organization and the potential threats to those assets as well. Besides, And organization will assess the likelihood that each threat will occur and the impact it may have on the critical business processes. The main subtasks of BIA phase may include identifying priorities, risk identification, likelihood assessment, impact analysis and resources prioritization.
- Continuity planning: focuses on establishing and implementing a continuity strategy to reduce the impact realized risks or threats might have on protected critical assets. In this phase, the primary subtasks include strategy development, and provisions and processes that are performed with the goal of creating a continuity of operations plan (COOP).
- Approval and implementation: the focus in this step will be to gain senior management support and endorsement of the BCP plan
BCP involves assessing the risks that an organizational business functions may face in disastrous situations. Additionally, it involves establishing policies, plans, and procedures to reduce the impact of those organizational risks to business objectives if they were to materialize. More specifically, BCP is employed to maintain the continuous operations of critical systems and business functions in disastrous events only with restricted infrastructure resources. This means, the BCP will enable only critical systems that are capable of supporting critical business functions, not the whole business operations.
Elements of BCP may include one or more of the following:
- Initial data
- Purpose and scope
- Change management
- Policy information
- Emergency response and management procedures
- Flow diagrams
- Checklists
- Plan glossary of terms
- Schedule for plan reviewing, Testing and updating