Let’s talk about business continuity.
The post is aimed at organisations looking to ensure they can continue operating during unexpected disruptions.
In brief, the post describes business continuity and its objectives and value. You’ll also get a detailed description of a business continuity programme, including its characteristics, roles and responsibilities, and legal considerations.
In the end, you’ll gain a better understanding of the topic and its importance in today’s world, where disruptions can come from various sources.
What is business continuity?
Business continuity refers to planning and implementing procedures and systems to ensure that a business can continue operating or quickly resume operations during an unexpected disruption, such as a natural disaster, cyber-attack, or other crisis.
The objective of business continuity
The primary objective of business continuity planning is to minimise the impact of disruptions on the business and its customers.
It also ensures the organisation can continue to provide its products or services to customers without significant interruption. This process involves identifying critical business functions, assessing risks and vulnerabilities, and developing and testing plans to mitigate those risks.
The value of business continuity
Its value is significant, particularly in today’s world, where disruptions can occur from various sources, such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, pandemics, and supply chain disruptions.
The following list demonstrates the value of business continuity:
- Minimising financial loss: Business continuity planning can help you minimise financial loss by ensuring your critical operations can continue during and after a disruption. The planning can reduce the impact of revenue loss, asset damage, and other financial consequences of a disruption.
- Reducing downtime: You can minimise downtime and quickly recover from disruptions by having a plan to ensure the continuity of critical operations. Efficient recovery helps you maintain your reputation, customer base, and market share.
- Maintaining customer trust: Business continuity planning can help you keep your customers’ trust. How? By ensuring you continue providing products and services even during and after a disruption.
- Compliance with regulations: In some industries, such as healthcare and finance, regulations require organisations to have a business continuity plan. Implementing a business continuity programme can help organisations to comply with these regulations.
- Enhancing organisational resilience: Business continuity planning assists you in building resilience by identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities and taking steps to mitigate them. The impact is that you’ll be able to adapt to changing circumstances and emerge stronger from disruptions.
- Improved decision-making: You can make faster and more informed decisions during a crisis with a business continuity plan. Efficient decision-making and effective responses to disruptions help minimise their impact.
The business continuity programme
Introducing the programme
The programme is a comprehensive approach to ensuring that an organisation can continue its critical operations during and after a disruption.
The programme’s characteristics
- Risk management: The programme involves identifying, analysing, and managing potential risks and threats that could disrupt your operations.
- Proactive: It’s a proactive approach to identifying potential disruptions before they occur and taking measures to prevent or mitigate their impact.
- Ongoing: The programme’s continuing process involves regular assessment, planning, testing, and updating procedures and plans to ensure their effectiveness.
- Collaboration: It involves collaboration among different departments and external partners to ensure that critical functions can continue during a disruption.
- Comprehensive: The covers cover all critical functions and operations, including IT systems, communications, supply chain, and personnel.
The programme is not a DR plan
On the one hand, a disaster recovery plan is a subset of the programme focusing on recovering IT systems and data after a disruption. The programme, on the other hand, encompasses all critical functions and operations of the organisation and focuses on maintaining business continuity during and after a disruption.
Roles and responsibilities in the programme
The success of the programme relies on the involvement and cooperation of various roles and responsibilities.
These roles include senior management, business continuity manager, business continuity team, departmental coordinators, IT, HR and risk management. By working together, these roles can ensure that the organisation is adequately prepared to manage disruptions and maintain critical operations.
Effective business continuity planning
Effective planning involves several key elements, including:
- Business continuity policy: The policy outlines your commitment to maintaining critical operations during and after a disruption and guides how the programme will be managed. It also helps to ensure that the programme is aligned with your strategic objectives and values. Discover how to do by reading our post on “Ten practical steps to draft a business continuity policy”.
- Business impact analysis (BIA): The BIA involves identifying critical business processes and systems and assessing the potential impact of a disruption on these processes and systems.
- Risk assessment: The assessment involves identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities to the business and assessing their likelihood and potential impact.
- Business continuity plan (BCP): The BCP is a detailed plan that outlines the steps to be taken in the event of a disruption, including procedures for evacuating personnel, securing data, and restoring critical systems.
- Crisis management plan: This plan outlines the procedures and roles for managing a crisis, including communication protocols and decision-making processes.
- Testing and training: BCPs must be regularly tested and updated to ensure their effectiveness. Personnel should also receive regular training on the plan and their role in executing it.
Legal considerations
- Regulatory compliance: Depending on the industry, specific regulations may require you to have a BCP. For example, the financial sector must have a plan to ensure the continuity of critical services during a disruption.
- Contractual obligations: Contracts with suppliers, customers, and partners may have specific requirements for business continuity planning. You must ensure that your BCP aligns with these contractual obligations and that they can continue to meet them during a disruption.
- Data protection: Data protection laws, like POPIA, require you to protect personal data against unauthorised access, loss or destruction. So, the BCP must take into account the protection of personal data during a disruption.
- Employment law: Employment law requires employers to ensure the safety and welfare of employees. As such, the BCP must consider employees’ safety and welfare during a disruption.
- Intellectual property: Intellectual property is a critical asset for many organisations. So, the BCP must consider the protection of intellectual property during a disruption.
- Insurance: You may have insurance policies covering loss or damage from a disruption. Thus, the BCP must consider the requirements of insurance policies and the potential impact on insurance coverage.
Actions you can take next
- Set standards and guidelines for business continuity in your organisation by asking us to draft a business continuity policy.
- Ensure you comply with applicable laws by asking us to review your business continuity plan.
- Train your personnel on the ins and outs of business continuity by asking us to host a workshop on the topic.
- Ensure your vendors, suppliers, and contractors comply with your business continuity programme by asking us to draft the relevant contractual clauses.
- Understand the relationship between business continuity, data protection, and information security by reaching out to us for training.
