Why business continuity plan

A predefined business continuity plan when combined with proper insurance coverage will help your organization eliminate the need to make hasty decisions under stressful conditions. Business continuity planning is an expansive topic. With so many resources available on the internet, it can be difficult to know where to start.

We made it easy with our step-by-step guide to business continuity planning. Stay Informed. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email. What is a Business Continuity Plan? Your business will be more prepared to handle the unexpected. Your business will have safeguards in place in addition to insurance. Your business will invest in itself and its ability to bounce back. Your business will have a plan to continue providing acceptable service after the disaster.

Your business will better preserve its corporate reputation, image and revenue stream. Even several terabytes of data backed up by a small to mid-sized business can strain capacity and bandwidth.

By deploying business continuity and disaster recovery solutions leveraging cloud technologies and virtual servers, organizations can run critical business applications from backup instances on virtual servers in the cloud. Thank you for subscribing to our monthly newsletter. Yes, it can cover the costs of repairs, but in terms of loss of revenue and business prospects due to downtime, it has little effect. Keeping a business going is essential. Taking a very simple view, if you lose the ability to buy and sell, your business — for all practical purposes — ceases to function.

Business continuity makes this possible by establishing actions that must be taken to ensure operations remain active, no matter the nature of the disaster. For example:. When building your business continuity plan, you consider all the possible disruptions you might encounter.

Loss of power or an office location is one of the biggest reasons offsite and redundant backup remains one of the most important aspects of IT reliability. Your business simply cannot afford downtime. A solid business continuity plan can mean the difference between being back up and running in a matter of minutes versus days or even weeks. A business continuity plan positions your organization to survive serious disruption. It eliminates confusion common to every disaster, providing a clear blueprint for what everyone should do.

Beyond business operations, your business continuity plan helps people. By keeping operations going, you are better positioned to keep your employees working, protecting the jobs that support them and their families. You also continue to meet the needs of your customers, impacting their lives, and if you are in a B2B business, the lives of their customers.

We have helped many businesses develop and implement business continuity plans. In addition to consulting services like these, our IT services can remove the burden of monitoring and managing your data infrastructure to help give you increased reliability, reduced risk and a comprehensive business continuity plan in the event of a disaster. Ricoh uses data collection tools such as cookies to provide you with a better experience when using this site.

You can learn how to change these settings and get more information about cookies here. Home Resources Articles 5 reasons business needs business continuity plan.

You never need a continuity plan until you do. Here are 5 reasons you should start yours today. Time: 6 minute read. In this article, we will discuss: What constitutes business continuity planning and the difference between it and disaster recovery The top 5 reasons your organization needs a business continuity plan The importance of business continuity planning beyond simply restoring operations How to get started building a business continuity plan.

What is business continuity planning? Close Your request was submitted successfully. Contact Us. These losses can be financial, legal, reputational and regulatory. The risk of having an organization's "license to operate" withdrawn by a regulator or having conditions applied retrospectively or prospectively can adversely affect market value and consumer confidence.

Build your recovery strategy around the allowable downtime for these processes. If your organization doesn't have a BC plan in place, start by assessing your business processes, determining which areas are vulnerable, and the potential losses if those processes go down for a day, a few days or a week.

This is essentially a BIA. One common business continuity planning tool is a checklist that includes supplies and equipment, the location of data backups and backup sites, where the plan is available and who should have it, and contact information for emergency responders, key personnel and backup site providers. Remember that the disaster recovery plan is part of the business continuity plan, so developing a DR plan if you don't already have one should be part of your process.

And if you do already have a DR plan, don't assume that all requirements have been factored in,O'Donnell warns. You need to be sure that restoration time is defined and "make sure it aligns with business expectations. As you create your plan, consider interviewing key personnel in organizations who have gone through a disaster successfully. People generally like to share "war stories" and the steps and techniques or clever ideas that saved the day.

Their insights could prove incredibly valuable in helping you to craft a solid plan. Testing a plan is the only way to truly know it will work, says O'Donnell. However, a controlled testing strategy is much more comfortable and provides an opportunity to identify gaps and improve. You have to rigorously test a plan to know if it's complete and will fulfill its intended purpose.

In fact, O'Donnell suggests you try to break it. This is the only way to improve. Also, ensure the objectives are measurable and stretching. Doing the minimum and 'getting away with it' just leads to a weak plan and no confidence in a real incident. Many organizations test a business continuity plan two to four times a year. The schedule depends on your type of organization, the amount of turnover of key personnel and the number of business processes and IT changes that have occurred since the last round of testing.

Common tests include table-top exercises, structured walk-throughs and simulations. Test teams are usually composed of the recovery coordinator and members from each functional unit.

A table-top exercise usually occurs in a conference room with the team poring over the plan, looking for gaps and ensuring that all business units are represented therein. In a structured walk-through , each team member walks through his or her components of the plan in detail to identify weaknesses.

Often, the team works through the test with a specific disaster in mind. Some organizations incorporate drills and disaster role-playing into the structured walk-through. Any weaknesses should be corrected and an updated plan distributed to all pertinent staff.