Business continuity is an organization’s ability to maintain or quickly resume acceptable levels of product or service delivery following a short-term event that disrupts normal operations. Examples of disruptions range from natural disasters to power outages.

 

What Does Business Continuity Include?

BC covers the planning and preparation needed to ensure an organization will have the capability to perform its critical business functions during emergency events.

It identifies, plans for, and/or creates:

  • How to communicate with customers, vendors and other third parties to ensure you are providing good information and support.
  • How to ensure services or products can still be provided to customers.
  • The order and timing required to restore business processes.
  • How to support employees during an emergency event.
  • The required technology to support the business functions (disaster recovery – or DR – will implement recovery solutions for technology).
  • Workaround processes to use when technology is not available.
  • Where and how to relocate people and processes in the event business locations are impacted or not available.
  • The teams and organization that will be necessary to manage emergency events.
  • Business process dependencies (what, or who does each business process rely upon in order to do their work).
  • Regular exercises to validate that plans and actions meet requirements and will be functional in an actual event.
  • Ensure staffing levels will be adequate during an event for both external and internal needs.
  • Documentation of the steps and actions to take during an event to accomplish the items above.
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