What is Business Continuity and what is Business Continuity Planning? How do you visualize Business Continuity Principles and how do you use a Business Continuity dashboard as your Business Continuity Management System? Read it here.
Let us define Business Continuity Planning
Business Continuity: The capability of the organization to continue delivery of products or services at acceptable predefined levels following a disruptive incident.
Business Continuity Planning: This is the process involved in creating a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company.
Business Continuity Management: A holistic management process that identifies potential threats to an organization and the impacts on business operations those threats, if realized, might cause, and which provides a framework for building organizational resilience with the capability of an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand, and value-creating activities.
Business Continuity Management System: Part of the overall management system that establishes, implements, operates, monitors, reviews, maintains, and improves business continuity.
Source: ISO 22301:2019
Business Continuity Principles
Business Continuity Principle according Dragon1:
Principle Business Continuity - Long Statement: 'By increasing the organization's ability (via various techniques or concepts such as UPS, failover, complexity reduction, reducing dependencies, increasing security, redundancy, and recoverability) to prevent critical systems to go ever offline completely or switch over to alternative internal or external systems, it is ensured that operations and core business functions are not severely impacted by a disaster or unplanned incident and with that increasing the business continuity, efficiency and profitability of the organization.'
Principle Business Continuity - Short Statement: 'Preventing critical systems to down completely or being able to quickly switch over to alternative systems, increases continuation of delivery of products and services.'
Business Continuity Principle according TOGAF:
Principle 4: Business Continuity - Statement: 'Enterprise operations are maintained despite system interruptions.'
Business Continuity Plan
A key component of a business continuity plan (BCP) is a disaster recovery plan that contains strategies for handling IT disruptions to networks, servers, personal computers, and mobile devices.
The plan should cover how to reestablish office productivity and enterprise software so that key business needs can be met. Manual workarounds should be outlined in the plan, so operations can continue until computer systems can be restored.
Key features of an effective BCP
The components of business continuity are:
- Strategy: Objects that are related to the strategies used by the business to complete day-to-day activities while ensuring continuous operations.
- Organization: Objects that are related to the structure, skills, communications, and responsibilities of its employees.
- Applications and data: Objects that are related to the software necessary to enable business operations, as well as the method to provide high availability that is used to implement that software.
- Processes: Objects that are related to the critical business process necessary to run the business, as well as the IT processes used to ensure smooth operations.
- Technology: Objects that are related to the systems, network, and industry-specific technology necessary to enable continuous operations and backups for applications and data.
- Facilities: Objects that are related to providing a disaster recovery site if the primary site is destroyed.
The business continuity plan becomes a source reference at the time of a business continuity event or crisis and the blueprint for strategy and tactics to deal with the event or crisis.
The following visualization illustrates a business continuity planning process used by IBM Global Technology Services. It’s a closed-loop that supports continuing iteration and improvement as the objective. There are three major sections to the planning process:
- Business prioritization: Identify various risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, and establish priorities.
- Integration into IT: Take the input from business prioritization and perform an overall business continuity program design.
- Manage: Administer what has been assessed and designed.
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Business Continuity Management System
A business continuity management system (BCMS) emphasizes the importance of:
- Understanding the organization’s needs and the necessity for establishing business continuity policies and objectives;
- operating and maintaining processes, capabilities, and response structures for ensuring the organization will survive disruptions;
- Monitoring and reviewing the performance and effectiveness of the BCMS;
- continual improvement based on qualitative and quantitative measures.
Benefits of a BCMS
The purpose of a BCMS is to prepare for, provide, and maintain controls and capabilities for managing an organization’s overall ability to continue to operate during disruptions. In achieving this, the organization is:
One of the important products in business continuity planning is the current status of the application architecture landscape. It is of the utmost importance to know which applications are used by the company and what the importance of those applications is.
Is it an application that supports a primary process or is it an application that supports a supporting process? The security measures to be taken are geared to this.
A dashboard always shows the most current situation. For management, this could help in setting priorities for action.
When a user moves the mouse over this dashboard, explanatory texts can be found for the various topics.
In addition, this dashboard can be made 'clickable'. This means that when you click on a topic, the underlying documentation can be seen. That saves a lot of search time because the names of pieces are not always logical.
Read Also
If you know of a great example of Business Continuity Planning that should be added here, please submit your suggestion to info@dragon1.com.
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