Business continuity is about being prepared. Businesses that invest in business continuity can avoid losing money, time, and customers.
Whether you are a business, nonprofit, or public sector organization, it is good to have a backup strategy that keeps things going when the worst happens.
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Why is business continuity important?
Business continuity vs. disaster recovery
A solid business continuity plan prevents or minimizes financial loss, compliance issues, reputation damage, or legal liability. It is an essential element of any forward-thinking organization. Eventually, problems will occur. With a good business continuity plan, you’ll be ready for them.
At Symplicity, we understand the importance of having a business contingency plan. Schedule a free consultation today and learn how we can help you!
What Is Business Continuity?
Business continuity (BC) refers to the strategies and systems that allow an organization to maintain essential operations during and after adverse events. Through BC planning, organizations can prepare for unpredictable crises such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, pandemics, and other external threats that interrupt mission-critical functions and services.
To achieve continuity, companies evaluate potential risks, rank time-sensitive functions by priority, create incident response guidelines and implement backup systems for essential operations. Though full operation may not be possible, a good BC strategy safeguards an organization’s most vital business functions.
While initially developed for large enterprises, business continuity benefits organizations of any size.
Why Is Business Continuity Important?
BC planning is essential for organizational resilience. When unexpected disasters or disruptions strike, companies without continuity plans often struggle to recover—if they manage to survive at all.
By contrast, organizations with robust continuity capabilities can quickly stabilize critical operations, serve customers, support employees, and emerge stronger than ever.
A good BC plan can:
- Minimize disruptions. An effective business continuity plan minimizes disruption to operations and customer service by anticipating potential failures and putting plans in place to respond quickly.
- Meet compliance requirements. Some industries have regulatory requirements that mandate business continuity plans. These plans demonstrate diligent risk management.
- Build resilience. A good BC plan strengthens an organization’s ability to recover from any type of disruption, from minor incidents to major disasters. It develops business resilience over time.
- Reduce financial losses. By maintaining critical operations and recovering quickly, business continuity helps minimize revenue losses, replacement costs, fines for noncompliance, and other financial challenges that disasters can inflict.
- Support customers and stakeholders. Smooth operations during challenging circumstances prove an organization’s commitment to its customers.
Many companies fail to recognize the importance of a BC plan because they haven’t taken the time to ask the question, “What if?” In a case study by Zurich North America, ZRS, a California-based restaurant chain, did just that. After an earthquake event tabletop test, ZRS found that they were not prepared for earthquakes.
As a result, “The company identified significant Business Continuity Plan gaps and improvements. It also requested additional infrastructure outage data to use in its upcoming insurance submission. . . .” By taking the time to ask the right questions, ZRS was able to detect its weak points and create an actionable BC plan.
What Does a Business Continuity Plan Include?
A successful business continuity plan includes:
- An incident response structure
- A risk assessment
- A business impact analysis
- Operational strategies
- Testing and refinement
Incident Response Structure
This outlines roles and responsibilities for emergency response teams and crisis management. It covers administrative protocols, communications plans, decision authority, and incident command structures.
Risk Assessment
Careful evaluation of potential threats helps gauge impact and probability for prioritizing continuity planning and resources. Common disruptions include IT outages, supply chain interruptions, damage to property, and human resource availability.
Business Impact Analysis
The business impact analysis defines the operational, financial, legal, and reputational impacts that different disaster scenarios would inflict. It sets recovery time objectives and priorities for critical business units and operations.
Operational Strategies
The continuity plan details immediate and interim solutions to keep vital business activities functioning during disruptions of primary facilities, technologies, third-party services, or staff. This includes workspace recovery locations, backup IT infrastructure, flexible supply and distribution channels, and cross-trained employees.
Testing and Refinement
Routine testing uncovers plan deficiencies for correction, incrementally improves response proficiency and readiness, and confirms technical recovery capabilities. Testing types include tabletop exercises, walkthroughs, simulations, and full-interrupt tests.
What Is Business Continuity Management?
Business continuity management is a holistic business process that goes beyond continuity planning to accomplish the following:
- Risk analysis—regularly identifies and analyzes potential risks that could severely impact your operations.
- Impact analysis—defines the quantitative and qualitative impacts that different disruptions would inflict upon business functions and resources. This includes operational, financial, reputational, regulatory, and customer impacts and sets recovery time objectives.
- Strategy development—creates business continuity and technology disaster recovery strategies to resume essential operations as rapidly as possible amidst a crisis. This covers workspace relocation, technology redundancy, flexible supply chains, communications protocols, and staff cross-training.
- Implementation—installs resilient infrastructure solutions, documents response procedures, assigns roles and responsibilities across continuity teams, and integrates plans across departments
Which Business Continuity Tools Should You Use?
There are a lot of different business continuity tools to choose from, which all perform slightly different functions:
- Backup. Although storing data off-site or on a remote drive provides some business continuity, other tools are needed to back up the IT infrastructure and keep it functioning in the event of a disaster.
- Backup as a service. A third-party provider performs the backup. Again, only the data will be saved, not the IT infrastructure.
- Point-in-time and instant recovery copies. Point-in-time copies the entire database at regular intervals. Instant recovery similarly takes snapshots of entire virtual machines. Storing these copies offsite or on isolated infrastructure helps to quickly rebuild systems if the production environment gets disrupted.
- Cold sites. Businesses establish a basic infrastructure at a second facility, known as a cold site, to allow employees to work if a disaster or fire damages the main location. However, a cold site alone is not sufficient for disaster recovery as it does not contain replicas of critical data and systems, necessitating additional measures to back up and restore important information.
- Hot sites. A hot site is a fully equipped alternate facility that mirrors the main business location. Near real-time data replication allows rapid recovery after a disaster. Though hot sites exceed cold sites in minimizing downtime, the cost of duplicating infrastructure and continually synchronizing operations is much higher
- Disaster Recovery as a Service. Cloud-based disaster-recovery services host infrastructure, data, and application workloads on vendor platforms during a crisis. This allows seamless continuation but requires planning to ensure on-site provider facilities avoid geographic overlap with sites vulnerable to the same regional incidents.
- Physical tools. Physical disaster recovery tools mitigate the effects of natural disasters but not cyber attacks. Fire suppression tools and backup power sources support business continuity during fires and power outages.
- Virtualization. Businesses need help to back up IT infrastructure. Virtualization creates working replicas and automates disaster recovery to offsite virtual machines unaffected by physical disasters. This requires robust data movement and up-to-date tracking of all virtual machines.
Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery
BC focuses on essential operations across the entire organization. This involves ongoing plans to ensure critical business functions and overall business operations recover quickly amidst a major incident.
A disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, focuses specifically on restoring vital technology systems and data should outages or losses occur. So while BC takes a big-picture view of strengthening organizational resilience as a whole, disaster recovery planning deals with the tactical details of restoring critical IT infrastructure and information assets after an incident shuts them down.
These two terms are sometimes conflated but business continuity takes a broader, organizational view of resilience while disaster recovery focuses on recovering vital technology amidst a specific crisis.
About Symplicity
We specialize in delivering comprehensive business continuity solutions that safeguard your business and ensure operational resilience in the face of unexpected events and potential disruptions.
At Symplicity, our approach is supplier-neutral, meaning we analyze your budget, requirements, and industry to identify the ideal service provider for your needs.
We understand that each business has unique priorities and constraints, which is why we take a customized approach to match you with the ideal provider.
With our expertise, guidance, and ongoing support, we ensure your implementation is seamless and efficient, providing peace of mind that your critical systems and data are safeguarded. Trust us to help you navigate the complexities of the business continuity process and ensure your organization’s resilience in any scenario.
We can also help you with your managed IT, SIP trunking, business intelligence, business automation, and contact center service needs. See our solutions page for the full range of services we offer.
Business Continuity FAQ
What are the 4 Rs of business continuity strategy?
The four Rs of business continuity are:
- Reduction: aimed to prevent incidents and minimize damage
- Readiness: to effectively respond using prepared measures
- Response: through planned damage control and stakeholder communications
- Recovery: executed via continuity strategies
What are business continuity events?
Business continuity events are major incidents such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, supply chain disruptions, or staff unavailability that materially interrupt the delivery of critical organizational products, services, and financial viability requiring action.
What are the 4 P’s of business continuity?
The four P’s of business continuity are:
- Plan: to document the response
- Preparedness: via training exercises
- Prevention: through risk control
- Promotion: with ongoing tests, auditing, and reviews to improve resilience capabilities
How do I write a BCP plan?
To write a business continuity plan, clearly define roles for response teams, thoroughly assess effects of disruption, analyze quantitative business impacts, develop continuity strategies leveraging redundancies and alternate facilities, memorialize procedures, and routinely test readiness.
Is business continuity a risk?
Business continuity itself is not a risk but rather a means of managing risks that could materially disrupt organizational operations and viability. Continuity is the state of being able to operate through challenging unforeseen events.
What 3 types of exercises are performed in BCP?
Three exercise types performed are:
- Tabletop simulations to discuss hypothetical response coordination
- Walkthrough drills for step-by-step validation
- Full end-to-end scenario testing that executes actual continuity measures upon staged infrastructure.
What does a business continuity professional do?
A business continuity professional develops, coordinates, and executes activities that aim to enable an organization to continue operating and quickly recover in the event of a disruption, whether due to natural disasters, technology issues, or other threats.
References
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