Business Continuity Plan refers to instructions or procedures that help you to operate the business without causing any impact to your customers during a disaster. The disaster can be natural or man-made. Unlike Disaster recovery, BCP ensures the continuity of the entire organization.

 BCP ensures that all the entities(asset, resources, people, location) in the business are available to provide the service to the end customers.

A recent study says that less than 5% SMB have a BCP in place and this causes huge disruption to their business. The brand value is affected because they are unable to provide services to the customers.

With BCP in place, you can quickly decide the right mode of operations to prevent loss of any services.

 Here is a list of important factors to be remembered while drafting a BCP

1. Do a Business Impact Analysis. 

  This involves studying the critical functions of the business and how they can be operated/resumed quickly.

2. Identify different threats that can affect the business. 

Example: Hurricane, floods, hacking, vulnerability and pandemic

3. Plan to mitigate the above threats.


4. Process to maintain continuity. 

   This includes the process to protect the people, infrastructure and data.

5. Identifying core team for BCP. 

This team will test the BCP process, give training and evaluate the readiness business-critical function. Ensure the BCP is executed during the crisis situation. Generally, they are members of critical business functions

6. Maintain the plan and review it. 

As the business evolves and new functions come to place, it is necessary to review the BCP plan.

Getting started with BCP may look cumbersome initially. As you onboard the key BCP leaders and discuss the objective, you can keep the ball rolling.

With ServiceDesk Project Management you can create BCP Project, Onboard the Key members of the Project, Create Milestones and the tasks that need to done to ensure BCP readiness.

Project: Business Continuity Planning

Key Members: IT team, HR team and Support Services

Milestone 1: Natural Disaster 

Tasks:

1. Alternate Locations for Support Services
   
2. Setting up VPN Connection 
   
3. Setting up DR Site
   
4. Taking backups of Critical Application Servers.
   

Emergency Contact details of BCP team.

Milestone 2: Fire accident

Tasks:

1. Contact details of Fire Service team.
   
2. Having a Backup Service for Critical application Service
   
3. Setting up a Maintenance schedule of Fire Extinguisher.
   
4. Setting up the Temperature Control in Server rooms
   
5.  Setting up a Building Evacuation plan.
   
6. Alternate location to resume support services.
   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3xdcdFkvko&t=6s

When I had a discussion with one of our customer who is a part of the BCP team he said there is no use if BCP documents are sitting the file and hardly can be accessed during the catastrophe. 

It is important that you have these BCP plan documented so that it can be accessed immediately when needed. It is vital that you have cloud storage to access critical documents. 

To conclude, every business needs to retain its existing customers and want to increase new customers to keep the business running. Good Service we provide during the critical situation always stays in the mind of the customer. To do so you need a Business Continuity Plan and be a practitioner of it.

The World has become unpredictable. We need to be prepared.