Businesses are faced with the possibility of threats to their operations on a daily basis. Whether it be natural disasters, cyberattacks, power outages, or mission-critical equipment failures, they are often beyond your control and come out of nowhere, so it’s important to be prepared.
Although we like to hope for the best in every situation, sometimes the worst happens. Ensuring your company has a business continuity plan (BCP) in place should be a top priority for businesses in every industry because without it, your business may never recover from those events beyond your control.
Business Continuity Plan: what does it even mean?
When disaster strikes, it can be a stressful and confusing time for everyone that works in the company, especially if nobody knows how to react.
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document that outlines how the company will respond to an emergency or disaster. It details the steps that must be taken to ensure your critical business operations continue until the disaster can be rectified, and it provides actionable solutions that can be immediately implemented to assist in successfully seeing the company through the event.
A BCP needs to include all the different aspects of business operations and processes and should also include specific time frames for recovery and define what are considered “critical” operations within the company.
Backup and disaster recovery is also a key component of a BCP because it will help ensure your recovery time objective is adequately met. The process of recovering data after a disaster may take weeks or months, so it is important for companies to have a plan for this as well. Backups should also be tested regularly and stored in an offsite location to guarantee that the data remains intact when you need it most.
The importance of a BCP
The importance of a BCP for businesses cannot be disputed. If disaster strikes, and you didn’t have the right practises and processes in place before the event, it could mean the end of your business, or at the very least, it could come with a hefty price tag because of downtime.
According to 2021 statistics, a small business will lose an average of $8,000 per hour of downtime, a medium company $74,000, and a large enterprise $700,000. That’s a lot of money in comparison to the costs paid to create and implement a BCP.
While the primary function of a BCP is to ensure that your business can continue regardless of what happens, it can also help your business in many other ways. It can help keep your company’s reputation in good standing through your proactive and fast response. It can assist you in building better business relationships with stakeholders and third parties, and it can ensure you meet compliance regulations.
Creating a BCP
There are 6 general steps to creating an effective BCP for your business:
- Determine the scope of the plan
- Ascertain your primary business areas
- Define your critical operations
- Identify any dependencies between different areas and operations
- Determine the recovery time objective for each critical operation
- Detail a plan to continue operations
In order to have a successful BCP in place, organisations must have strong risk management processes also. These processes will help them to recover from any business disruption that may occur and be able to prevent the same from happening again.
Risk management is an important part of emergency management. It helps organisations to identify risks and their potential impact on the organisation before they actually happen.
To ensure that you have the risk management processes and effective BCP needed to guarantee your business is prepared when the worst happens, contact the experts at Lindentech today. Their business continuity planning and risk management services are second to none.
