A business continuity plan defines how an organization will maintain or restore critical services during and after a disruption. It assigns priorities, people, alternatives and communications for scenarios in which normal facilities, staff, systems or suppliers are unavailable.
What should the plan contain?
- Critical services and process dependencies
- Maximum tolerable downtime and recovery objectives
- Incident roles, authority and contact paths
- Alternate staff, sites, systems and suppliers
- Manual workarounds and data-recovery procedures
- Client, regulator and employee communications
How is the plan developed?
- Perform a business impact analysis.
- Map resources and single points of failure.
- Select continuity and recovery strategies.
- Document activation and decision procedures.
- Exercise realistic scenarios and record gaps.
- Update the plan after changes and incidents.
Business continuity vs. disaster recovery
Business continuity covers the ability to continue critical operations. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring technology and data. A technology recovery can succeed while the business service still fails because staff, facilities or suppliers are unavailable.
What makes a plan usable?
Owners must be able to access it during the disruption, understand decision rights and execute tested alternatives. Contact lists and supplier assumptions should be validated rather than copied forward during an annual review.
