What Are the 5 Components of a Business Continuity Plan?
Out of the commonly offered IT infrastructure services, disaster recovery for businesses can often be the stand-out option. This makes sense, given that it’s crucial to have a way to recover from worst-case scenarios. However, while disaster recovery services are vital to a business’s success, they’re just one part of a larger business continuity plan.
When your business plans ahead for what could go wrong, it’s easier to navigate disruptive events. And for the most unpredictable disasters, continuity plans include measures for disaster recovery, so you can take worst-case scenarios in stride.
So what exactly does a business continuity plan contain, and how do you get started writing or updating an existing plan? That’s exactly what we'll be covering in this article. Let’s dive in.
What Is a Business Continuity Strategy?
A business continuity strategy is a plan for organizations to respond to changes while staying on track. Key components of a business continuity strategy include identifying risks, assigning roles and responsibilities to team members, and establishing a recovery plan. Focusing on business continuity is essential for success because it can yield the following benefits:
Fewer unexpected disruptions: Process bottlenecks, weak cybersecurity measures, and software bugs are just a few of the challenges that can slow your business down. Fortunately, you can avoid getting caught off guard. With a business continuity plan, you can identify which risks you are most susceptible to, so you can take steps to prevent them before they negatively impact your business. For example, if you find that your data is vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks, you can train your staff on how to avoid and report phishing scams.
Quicker recovery from disasters: Natural, physical, and technology-based disasters can threaten your business’s ability to operate. Whether it’s a building fire, a loss in power, or a ransomware attack, these disasters shut your business down and keep it closed—unless you have an effective disaster recovery plan. While you can’t prevent every disaster, you can respond in ways that minimize the damage to your customers, team members, property, data, reputation, and profits.
Increased customer satisfaction: Customers value reliability and trust. They want to know that when they go to use your products or services, they’ll be able to. They also don’t want to worry about whether or not their data will be safe with you—security should be a given. Uncovering and solving issues that would negatively impact your customers before they happen keeps those customers happy and using your product or service.
Improved team morale: Customers aren’t the only ones that value reliability; your team will also become frustrated if they have to constantly “put out fires.” Whether it's your customer support team doing their best to appease unhappy customers or your IT team trying to recover data from a malware attack, these high-stakes situations put a lot of stress on your team members. Taking a proactive approach to business continuity reduces the frequency of stressful situations, so your team has more mental bandwidth to improve your business.
According to Forbes, 51% of organizations have been affected by outages that have caused substantial damage to their finances and reputation within the past three years. Having a business continuity plan helps your organization avoid these outages or recover quickly from them should they happen.
Business Continuity Plan vs Disaster Recovery Plan
The key difference between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan is that a disaster recovery plan only responds to a crisis, while a business continuity plan prepares to avoid disasters and recover from them. In other words, disaster recovery is an essential piece of a continuity plan, but having just a disaster recovery plan means you miss out on essential continuity elements such as crisis prevention.
Think of disaster recovery as visiting an emergency room. In a crisis, you need access to the emergency room for the best chance at recovering. Business continuity covers the entire health of your business, including regular visits with your doctor to identify potential issues down the road. This preventive care keeps small issues from growing into catastrophic ones, which can reduce the need for costly and time-consuming emergency room visits.
5 Components of a Business Continuity Plan
Business continuity plans should be comprehensive, although you can’t realistically plan for every situation that may arise. Instead, you can plan generally for different types of challenges. That way, you can get organized quickly and start problem solving. To see if your strategy is preparing you for success in the face of adversity, ensure you are following business continuity plan guidelines by including:
Risk Assessment: Identify what challenges could slow down your business and which of those challenges you are currently vulnerable to. For example, do consistent software bugs lock out your customers, or is the firewall protecting your financial data up-to-date? Prioritize which risks are threatening your success the most, so you can make the most impactful improvements. If you are vulnerable to data breaches, then backing up your data to a third-party server allows you to keep your business running if your servers become compromised.
Disaster Recovery: Disaster is a matter of if, not when. But with the right recovery plan, you can minimize downtime and damage to your reputation and finances. Your disaster recovery plan should cover for data loss, human error, customer acquisition, reputation repair, resource allocation, and compliance with regulations.
Role and Responsibility Assignments: Disruptions can cause a lot of confusion, so it’s important to have established roles and responsibilities. Who will coordinate problem solving efforts? Who is the contact person on various teams? Who is responsible for key tasks like recovering data? Having clear roles will help avoid duplicative efforts that waste time and can even make matters worse.
Communication Protocols: When problems arise, it’s important to communicate potential disruptions to the right people. This may seem like a straightforward step, but communicating key information to the wrong people can waste critical time. Even if you contact the right people, confusing or irrelevant messages can also drag out the problem-solving process. For effective communication, be sure to establish what the key information is for a given situation and who needs to know it.
Testing and Training: Ongoing employee training and procedural testing will help ensure that your team is actively working to prevent crises, while your emergency systems can help recover from them. For example, training employees to spot malware will help avoid cybersecurity attacks, and an antivirus software can protect your databases.
How To Write a Business Continuity Plan? Trust the Experts.
When it comes to running your business, stability is an appreciating asset. When you know what to expect, you can plan accordingly and capitalize on opportunities. However, you don’t know what you don’t know, and that can end up costing you. It’s difficult to plan for everything, especially when your team’s bandwidth is also stretched thin.
That’s where Moser’s tabletop activities can help. As your partner in technology, Moser can help you push your plan to the limits to see what’s working and what needs to be improved.
Don’t wait for the worst-case scenario to see if your business continuity plan will be effective. Get in touch with our team to see how you can protect your business.
