Introducing the Idea of Business Continuity
We’re going to keep things simple, as we try to do throughout this book; in fact doing so is pretty easy because BC is in the main pretty straightforward. Business continuity is understanding your business, devising strategies based on this knowledge and recording these strategies into plans to enable you to trade through a disruption and recover afterwards.
Whatever the size of your business, the key principles of BC and the steps to follow remain the same:
1. Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Understanding your business so that you’re able to work out what’s really important to it and the activities that produce these aspects or make them happen. In this part you identify:
• Your key products and services
• The critical activities on which they depend
Flip to the next section, ‘Revealing the Key Terms and Concepts’, where we define these terms for you. Also, Chapter 4 has loads more on BIA.
2. Maximum tolerable period of disruption, recovery time objective and then recovery point objective: The next part of your BIA is working out these three items, which are when you need to resume your critical activities, your objective time for resuming them and the level or point to which you need to resume them.
3. Risk assessment: Looking at the risks to the critical activities of your key products and services. Assess Chapter 5 for more about risk.
4. Supply chain: Understanding what influence you can have on those that supply to you and looking at what you can do to make your key products and services more resilient when others fail. (The later section in this chapter ‘Considering your supply chain’ and Chapter 6 have more information.)
5. Building resilience: Creating strategies to ensure the continuity and recovery of your critical activities.
6. Business continuity plans: Pulling everything together. You need to record all the above elements into plans, so that everyone knows what to do when disaster strikes. Flip straight to Chapter 8 for how to put together your plans.