11 Jun 2013

Intro to Business Continuity

Definition

Activities carried out by an organization for ensuring that critical business functions are made available to regulators, suppliers, customers and all other entities that are directly or indirectly related to the business and must have access to the critical business functions is known as business continuity. The activities carried out by a business organization include daily chores like help desk, change control, system backups and project management. It is very important to understand that business continuity is not something that is implemented when a disaster occurs. It is rather something that needs to be performed on a day-to-day basis for service maintenance and for ensuring recoverability and consistency.

Business Continuity Foundations

There are several foundations of business continuity which are briefly discussed below:

Business Continuity/Business Continuity Methodology Plan

Components of BCM or Business Continuity Methodology which are necessary for appearance in a documented plan are instructions, documents and procedures which will help a business to quickly respond to threats, emergencies, disasters and accidents without stopping the key operations. This is also called recovery plan, disaster recovery plan or resumption plan.

Business Continuity/Business Continuity Methodology Planning

This refers to identification, development, acquisition, documentation and resources and procedure testing which are important for ensuring the continuity of critical business operations in face of a disaster, accident, threat and/or emergency. The BC/BCM planning involves:

  • Planning risk mitigation (reduction of probability of adverse events).
  • Planning business recovery (continued operation after the disaster).

Guidelines

These refer to things which are recommended (by the management) to be performed as per a plan that is preset. However, based on the requirements and needs during the time of operation, these guidelines may be altered or may not be followed at all.

Policies

Policies are things which are made mandatory by the management and are to be performed by everyone in accordance with a predefined design plan. The policies support all the business functions with a given organization.

Program

It is an ongoing process carried out by the management. This process makes sure that steps necessary for identifying disasters, accidents, threats and/or emergencies are taken regularly. The process includes assessment of the possible effects of such events, development of plans and strategies for recovery and training personnel and testing the plan to ensure readiness.

Procedures

These are the specifications provided by the standards (defined by regulatory bodies) for implementation of the system of business continuity management within any given organization.

Standards

There are several standards sets by regulatory bodies which state what should be included in a business continuity program. These regulatory bodies give an outline but never give detailed contents and plans because businesses vary and so do their critical activities. Some of the regulatory bodies include ISO (International Organization for Standardization), BSI (British Standards Institutions) etc.

BIA or Business Impact Analysis

The core idea of business continuity is based on:

  • Identifying each and every single business function within a given organization.
  • Assigning each function a level of importance.

To achieve these two, Business Impact Analysis or BIA is used. It is the tool that gathers the required information and then assigns the following:

  • Criticality.
  • Recovery Point Objective.
  • Recovery Time Objective.

Thus, BIA is one of the basic foundations of business continuity. Business Impact Analysis is a very critical aspect and an in-depth analysis of the same is far beyond the scope of this article. However, it can be mentioned that BIA can be used for examining the effects of interruption of strategic, functional and operational activities within an organization. It can also be used to find the impacts of major changes in a business like introduction of a new product.

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