What is Business Continuity?
Business continuity is a very important aspect of the sustainability of business and day to day operations. Most of the small business owners overlook this concept and when they realize it always too late. Business owners need to understand this concept and make sure their business is running even at the time of downtime.
To implement the business continuity, it’s very important for business owners and executives and drafts the right strategy and thoroughly implements it. Let’s have a look at some of the important points
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Why make a business continuity plan?
Business is made up of the efforts of thousands of employees and the trust of millions of customers. A thousand families depend upon one business and their livelihood runs with the income they receive from that business. In case of a data disaster or loss, all these families will suffer along with disruption is business operations. Therefore, it’s essential to plan and make sure that your business operations are up and running in case of any data loss or disaster.
What are the elements of a business continuity strategy?
A thorough and working continuity strategy isn’t just a set of measures that are put when something terrible happens. It is a constantly evolving process that helps you to sustain operations by facing several issues without affecting your organization’s progress. Every element of continuity strategy plays a very important role in sustaining business operations.
Element I-Initiation
In this phase, you need to decide the goal of continuity strategy and what aspects of the business are going to cover in this and who is going to carry out the protocols mentioned in the outline
Element II-Analysis
In this phase, you will conduct threat and risk analysis (TRA) and Business impact analysis (BIA), and as the results of these tests coming out. You will set the variables accordingly to protect the threat in the best way
The BIA will classify the functions of a critical organization with those that aren’t critical for the sustainability of the business. Once determined, each critical function will be assigned a Recovery time objective (RTO) and Recovery point objective (RPO). The recovery time objective means the time it will take to restore the data loss and recovery point objective means an accepted percentage of data loss that an organization can afford to lose to sustain operations. Under BIA, an organization would also like to know the maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPOD). This is the maximum time that is required to restore the main systems when investors decide to pull the investment out of the system.
The TRA will highlight the major threats that businesses may face. Some of the major threats include
- Power cut
- Cyberattacks
- Hardware failure
- Sickness
- Fire
- On or off-site utility storage
Each of these must be considered to determine the objectives of the threat. This way you will have a complete understanding of where your organization stands in a sense of diversity.
Element III: Continuity plan design
The next step in implementing a continuity plan is the launch design. By this time, you should know the continuity plan will be designed and who will be responsible for the implementation of the continuity plan. A team of specialists will be made, and tasks will be assigned to each person. Each member of the team should know how to contact each other and enhance the prospect by successfully launching the program quickly and efficiently
Element IV: Implementation
In this phase, the team will highlight the solutions that are required to implement the continuity plan. In this phase, all the required planning and solutions are very well implemented. Some of the main elements that need to place currently are:
- Emergency response procedure
- Detailed recovery procedure
- Continuity activation procedure
- Purchase of recovery resources
Element V: Testing and maintenance
The continuity plan doesn’t require just implementation as its complex process. It requires testing each element to be sure that it works in the worse element. Along with testing you need proper maintenance to make sure that it’s always up and running.
