A BCP or a Business Continuity Plan is a foundation document for any organisation and should be a core part of any set of internal policies.

What is it?

In it’s purest sense, it’s a document that outlines how you, as an organisation, would approach a disaster, in a variety of forms. It covers all forms of disaster including loss of buildings to loss of IT. Typically IT, due to the way IT is embedded in everything we do, will be a key element in the document.

Why is it important?

Disaster can strike any organisation at any time, so it’s important to be organised. Should the worse happen then at least being prepared by documenting your approach will ensure you can approach any scenario in a calm and orderly manner and all parties involved will be clear on the approach.

What should it include?

Introduction – The introduction to your business continuity plan will include company information and contact details as well the overall objectives for the BCP.

Form a BCP Group – Form a group of key people as these will be the people who will be in charge of any recovery, typically this will include people such as head of HR, head of IT, head of Finance, Chief Executive and perhaps buildings managers if you have one.

Objective – Set out your objective for the plan. What is it that you want to get out of putting one in place?

Activation – Detail what would constitutes activation of the plan. Define clearly how and who is responsible for that assessment.

Identification – Identify what your critical elements of the organisation are. Unless you know what these are there will be no way of performing a risk assessment.

Risk Assessment – This will be the largest section in your BCP. Complete a risk assessment (with scoring matrix) and analyse what the key disaster risks are for your own organisation and then set out in a process designed format how you would recover from such a disaster. This is likely to include several types of disaster from loss of building, infectious diseases along with Cyber Security incidents, and more traditional IT issues such as server failures.

Create a list of contacts – Have ready a complete list of contacts (both staff and supplier) so that they can be called immediately in case of the BCP being activated.

Think about storing the document in a seperate safe location – It may be advisable to store this document in a seperate digital storage location away from your main set of documents. Why? What happens if disaster strikes your existing file storage location and you lose everything? Think about using a Free cloud storage service like Dropbox or OneDrive which can store these safely away from your main file storage location.

Contact

If you’d like any advice around these areas then please contact me at [email protected] or call me on 01473 345321.