Breaking Free from Manual Business Continuity Planning
Business continuity is about preparation, not paperwork. By leveraging BC Plan inFusion, companies can focus on more strategic work.
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What is a business continuity plan (BCP)?
A business continuity plan is a step-by-step guide to follow when your business encounters a disruption. It clearly spells out:
- The roles and responsibilities of everyone designated to help address the disruption.
- The steps to take in order to minimize the effects of an incident and return to “business as usual” as quickly as possible.
- A communication plan to ensure everyone is informed of the situation in a timely manner and knows exactly what to do.
To develop and maintain an effective, dependable BCP, you must:
- Begin with a clear understanding of your company’s most critical functions, as well as a sense of the risks potentially threatening them.
- Have a cross-functional team work together to strategize the best ways to protect, mitigate, and resurrect your most crucial systems and abilities.
- Test and improve your business continuity plan regularly.
- Assess your plan after every incident to determine what worked, what didn’t, and how you can make your plan better.
Why is a business continuity plan necessary?
A BCP is necessary because disruptions are bound to happen, and you need a blueprint for recovery. Like all emergency plans, a BCP is required to minimize harm. Specifically, it aims to:
- Keep your business’s most essential functions up and running and minimize any downtime.
- Guide the implementation of temporary fallback plans when necessary.
- Safeguard your employees.
- Keep your entire company, your vendors, and your customers informed during a disruption, preventing confusion and chaos.
- Protect your company’s reputation.
- Maintain the confidence of your customers and partners.
- Ensure regulatory and legal compliance.
What problems does a business continuity plan solve?
A BCP enables your organization to move quickly and effectively during a disruption, preventing or minimizing a host of problems, including:
- Loss of productivity and revenue
- Reputational damage
- Loss of market share to competitors
- Confusion among your staff, partners, and customers in the wake of a disruption
- Physical danger to your employees
- In the worst-case scenario, the inability to recover
How do you implement a business continuity plan?
The key to a successful BCP is knowing precisely how your business operates and where all of your dependencies lie. You need to have a good understanding of how all the parts of your organization work together so you can create effective plans to survive and recover from disruptions.
Implementation of a BCP generally follows these steps:
- To begin, you need the findings of a business impact analysis (BIA). A BIA identifies your company’s most important functions and determines exactly how long you can survive without them.
- Another building block for a BCP is a risk assessment. This helps you anticipate your likely threats and spot your vulnerabilities.
- Using this information, your BCP team needs to strategize how you should prepare for and respond to a wide variety of scenarios.
- Once you’ve developed strategies, you need to transform them into documentation that people can understand and follow when a disruption occurs.
- Training and testing are crucial to the success of your business continuity plan and need to happen regularly.
- Continually modify your plan to ensure it still fits your company’s structure, functionality, and needs.
- Anytime you need to deploy your BCP, perform a review afterward to learn lessons and make improvements.
Because BCPs are so critical and because they require the input and participation of an entire enterprise, many companies use special software to create, carry out, and manage their BCPs.
How does Fusion help business continuity plans?
The Fusion platform is purpose-built to handle every aspect of business continuity and resilience, and BCPs are central to such efforts. Fusion makes BCPs more efficient and effective to build and use by:
- Replacing static and disconnected documents and spreadsheets, making your plans dynamic, and keeping your data up to date.
- Centralizing and linking information from across your enterprise so you always have a clear view into systems and situations.
- Streamlining and improving the business impact analyses (BIAs) and risk assessments that inform your BCP.
- Mapping out your dependencies so you can clearly see your vulnerabilities and understand how to remedy them.
- Facilitating and accelerating scenario testing and training.
- Ensuring regulatory compliance by aligning your BCP with mandates like ISO 22301, FFIEC, and DORA.
- Making it easy to produce reports.
Fusion also integrates with communication tools so that, in the event of a disruption, it will instantly notify employees, partners, and customers so everyone understands the situation and any steps to take.
Build a business continuity plan that actually works
It’s never been simpler to create a business continuity plan that is actionable, tested, and resilient. Fusion gives you the tools to get there.