Importance of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
When business is disrupted, costs can be significant. In addition, disruptions mean the potential for damage to your company’s reputation. A business continuity plan is essential to protect your organization. According to IDC, on average, an infrastructure failure can cost USD $100,000 an hour and a critical application failure can cost USD $500,000 to USD $1 million per hour. It is crucial to have a business continuity plan in place to identify and address resiliency across business processes, applications, and IT infrastructure.
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document that outlines how a business will continue operating during an unplanned disruption in service. A BCP is more comprehensive than a disaster recovery (DR) plan and contains contingencies for business processes, human resources, assets, and business partners – every aspect of the business that might be affected.
Plans generally contain a checklist that includes supplies and equipment, data backups and backup site locations. Plans should also include contact information for emergency responders, key personnel, and backup site providers. Plans may provide detailed strategies on how business operations can be maintained for both short-term and long-term outages.
Organizations are increasingly aware of their vulnerability to cyber-attacks that can cripple a business or permanently destroy its IT systems. Digital transformation and hyper-convergence creates unintended gateways to risks, vulnerabilities, attacks, and failures. Business continuity plans need to include a cyber resilience strategy that can help a business withstand disruptive cyber incidents. The plans typically include ways to defend against those risks, protect critical applications and data and recover from breach or failure in a controlled, measurable way.
The DR plan should cover how to reestablish office productivity and enterprise software so that key business needs can be met. Manual workarounds should be outlined in the plan, so operations can continue until computer systems can be restored.
Many organizations rely on Empower Resolutions for business continuity management consulting services to help identify and address resiliency synchronization between business processes, applications, and IT infrastructure. We provide flexible business continuity and disaster recovery consulting to address a company’s needs – including assessments, planning and design, implementation, testing and full business continuity management.
