What does your business do when there is a disaster? A disaster is something that occurs out of the ordinary that can have dire circumstances and interrupt normal business processes. Examples include floods, hurricanes, and virus infestations, although most disasters are caused by human mistakes, typically referred to as errors and omissions. Does your business have a plan, commonly known as a business continuity plan or BCP? Many companies unfortunately do not and have serious, sometimes terminal, problems should a disaster occur.

To create a good BCP, it is important to determine what the critical, as in most critical, business processes are. This is tough because quite honestly everyone thinks their “stuff” is the most important simply due to their world view. This is not surprising. A BCP team needs a strong leader with executive support to make hard decisions, and avoid politics. Just because a business unit leader is popular and has politic clout does not mean their business processes are more important. For example, although payroll is important it may not be critical. Employees may work for a couple weeks if payment is delayed, but if orders stop coming in the organization may cease to exist.

The disaster recovery plan, or DRP, is a subset of the BCP. Where the BCP is strategic, the DRP is a short range tactical plan to recover IT systems to support the critical business processes as quickly as needed. It may involve going to a backup data center, if for example the primary center is under 20 feet of water or otherwise dysfunctional. Sometimes we use the terms “hot site,” “warm site,” and “cold site” to indicate the readiness of the backup site. A hot site can typically be operational immediately or within a very few hours, a warm site with a few days, and a cold site with in a week. Other options include a mobile data center for backup, for example in a tractor trailer truck, and reciprocal agreements with other organizations.

BCPs are expensive, but they are far less expensive than going out of business forever.. Many companies think “It can’t happen to us,” but it can and eventually likely will. Every company not only should have a BCP but it should be up to date. If a BCP is one year out of date that means you can recover to where you were a year ago, which may not be sufficient! Someone needs to be responsible for updates.

Every company has a default backup plan however. It is “Go out of Business” or “Cease to Exist.” Should your company be taking that chance? If financially unstable and on the brink of going out of business, then maybe due to necessity, yes. Otherwise, you would be a fool to rely on the default BCP because it can happen to you!

Many company are in danger of ceasing to exist if something unexpected happens, something out of the ordinary, a “disaster.” An up to date business continuity plan can help prevent that from happening.

Author Bio: I am a frequent writer on the many topics that interest me, including business and home issues. For some more of my articles, visit Stair Tread Rugs and School Binders.

Category: Business Management
Keywords: business continuity plan, BCP, disaster recovery plan, DRP