BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING
Natural disasters have increased executive awareness and internal pressure to create a business continuity plan (BCP). Similarly, industry and government-driven regulations are placing more focus on business continuity capabilities.
As a results, clients often also demand that firm’s provide evidence that they have a workable BCP before agreeing to do business.
Critical insight
- BCP requires input from multiple departments with different and sometimes conflicting objectives. There are typically few, if any, dedicated resources for BCP, so it can't be a full-time, resource-intensive project.
- As an IT leader you have the skill set and organizational knowledge to lead a BCP project, but ultimately business leaders need to own the BCP – they know their processes, and therefore, their requirements to resume business operations better than anyone else.
- The traditional approach to BCP is a massive project that most organizations struggle to implement successfully.
Impact and Result
- Focus on implementing a structured and repeatable process that can be applied to one business unit at a time to avoid BCP becoming an overwhelming project.
- Enable business leaders to own the BCP going forward by establishing a template that the rest of the organization can follow.
- Leverage BCP outcomes to refine IT DRP recovery objectives and achieve DRP-BCP alignment.

What Business Continuity Planning entails
A business continuity plan (BCP) consists of several different plans as illustrated below. Our framework will enable your firm to:
- Develop a BCP for a selected business unit (as a pilot project), and thereby establish a methodology that can be repeated for remaining business units.
- Through the BCP process, clarify requirements for an IT disaster recovery plan (DRP).
- Implement ongoing business continuity management to govern BCP, DRP, and crisis management.

Why you should start Business Continuity Planning with your DRP

Tandem CIO's approach to Business Continuity Planning
