Business Continuity
Business Continuity is the ability of a business to continue operations with minimal disruption or downtime in the event of:
■ Natural disasters such as tornadoes, floods, blizzards, earthquakes and fire;
■ Accidents;
■ Sabotage;
■ Power and energy disruptions;
■ Communications, transportation, safety and service sector failure;
■ Environmental disasters such as pollution and hazardous materials spills; or
■ Cyber attacks and hacker activity.
Instead of focusing on resuming a business after critical operations have ceased,or recovering after a disaster, a business continuity plan (BCP) endeavors to ensure that critical operations continue to be available.
Recent world events have challenged us to prepare to manage previously unthinkable
situations that may threaten an organisation’s future. It is no longer enough to draft a response plan that
anticipates naturally, accidentally, or intentionally caused disaster or emergency scenarios.
Today’s threats require the creation of an on-going, interactive process that serves to assure
the continuation of an organisation’s core activities before, during, and most importantly,
after a major crisis event. Business continuity therefore needs to be incorporated into the organisations normal activities and hence it provides a framework for building resilience into the organisations processes.
Adopting industry best practice, we can help you create an effective BCP for your organisation.
This will include:
■ Identifying business processes and supporting assets
■ Prioritising the business processes and determining the allowable downtime
■ Developing strategies to recover processes within the allowable downtime
■ Identifying and mitigating risk, minimising the likelihood of a disaster
■ Implementing and training. Ensuring personnel know what to do
■ Testing, refining and validating whether the plan works and correcting any deficiencies
