How to Create a Business Continuity Plan?
Start by identifying your most critical processes. When a business continuity event occurs, taking a risk-based approach ensures that you understand what the most critical processes to your organization are that need to be prioritized first to get back up and running to minimize any impacts.
Next, assess your various risks. By evaluating all of the various types of risks that an incident could bring up – such as financial, reputational, customer, legal or strategic impact – you’re able to adequately determine which steps must be included in your BCP to minimize those impacts.
Be sure to implement strategic mitigations as part of your business impact analysis. Building a business continuity plan through a risk-based lens empowers you to design more effective policies and procedures that simultaneously minimize the impact of the disruption at hand.
Monitor the effectiveness of your controls over time. Otherwise, your BCP won’t align with your risks, leaving you likely to be caught off guard next time a business continuity event occurs.
Your BCP does not exist in isolation, so be sure to connect departmental efforts. This allows you to identify interdependencies that must be known if an event occurs to ensure all steps are taken.
Reporting is a key step in the risk-based approach, as it reveals patterns over time so that you can improve your BCP development where needed and keep your organization protected from any future disruption.
What Is The Difference between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?
The main difference between business continuity and disaster recovery is the timing of the plan. For example, in the case of business continuity planning, you would create a plan before or during an event and try to focus on keeping operations as normal as possible. However, disaster recovery planning completely focuses on the response to a specific event with the ultimate aim to create disaster recovery plans which get operations back to normal.
Unlike a BCP, a disaster recovery plan focuses on restoring IT infrastructure and accessing copies of data stored offsite at a data center without focusing too much on getting the business as a whole back up and running during the crisis itself. We can think of a DRP as a subset of the BCP. Ultimately, it is equally important for all employees at an organization to know exactly how to react if either risk management plan is put in place and the effect that this may have on business operations.
Companies may choose to focus on either crafting a BCP or DRP, subscribing to one mentality over the other. To be completely prepared, it’s essential to have both a comprehensive BCP and DRP in place to ensure complete coverage from the unthinkable
