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.