Business Continuity After a Disaster - BCP guest post ~ Article ...

Are You Sure Your Company Can Recover?

The notion of making provisions for business continuity is a relatively new phenomenon in the suite of company enhancement and survival tools in this new technological age.

With the large-scale transition of most businesses to the online forum, there exists many more ways for a business to fall to an attack (intentional or unintentional), than when there were just brick-and-mortar establishments using business cards and other offline methods as their primary modes of advertising.

Regardless of the industry you?re in; today, all that work can be compromised by something as infuriatingly simple as a bored high-school kid with a penchant for malicious cyber-hacking. ?A million-dollar edifice can be toppled by simply neglecting an open port; the key is having measures in place to significantly reduce the task of rebuilding.

Business Continuity Basics

A business continuity plan (BCP) is simply a way of ensuring that your company can recover after an otherwise catastrophic disaster ? whether electronic or physical. The former is referred to as disaster recovery; it implements a solution to rebooting just the electronic/IT aspect of your business. Business continuity is much broader in scope than mere disaster recovery, because it entails getting your entire business back up to speed.

Failing to consider a whole-system approach can leave you with the prohibitively expensive proposition of starting the entire business from scratch after a disaster of sufficient magnitude. Disaster recovery can?t, for example, aid you if the servers on which company information is stored are burned down in a fire. Anticipating and planning for these unfortunate events falls under a BCP. Recent floods in the Midwest have made it very clear what lack of planning can entail for a company?s future if a BCP isn?t in place. In addition to the physical problem of flooding the building, a good BCP can help you protect against something like rampant looting.

Solutions Provided by a BCP

In the event that a hurricane destroys your physical infrastructure, your business can emerge from this if company information had been stored on virtual servers.

Before this happens, however, there is an umbrella of important considerations affecting administrative processes. Are the communication channels between your suppliers and distributors up-and-running, for example? Are employees in a position of leadership intimately aware of the protocols set in place for the BCP should it ever be needed?

There should have been an assessment of the possible risks, as well as associated probabilities, beforehand. Only then can separate courses of action be instituted for each one.

Generally, a BCP consists of identifying the threats, and then setting up primary and secondary assessments of restoring function. Primary plans ensure your business has everything it needs to reboot and function at its most basic, sustainable level. Secondary is for beneficial, but less essential functions. Supportive elements are considered last, given the available resources.

In sum, there are telling industry statistics on the importance of having a BCP. Businesses that undergo a serious calamity without a business continuity plan in place, endure a half-year to 2 year spiral before failing completely. Starting from scratch seems to be a losing endeavor in any moderately competitive niche; enhancing the singular importance of a BCP for your company?s future.

Major Concerns in Choosing the Right BCP Overseer

As with most things in life; not all business continuity plan consultants are made alike. Because there are no ?do-overs? in the event of a catastrophe, you need to be confident that BCP oversight company you choose to manage your intellectual property has employees that are sufficiently trained in business continuity plan assessment techniques, to better ensure adequate testing of the components that comprise your company.?They need to be familiar with the necessary documentation, testing techniques, and methodology for deciding which elements to save first in the event of a catastrophe; basically, if they?re the type who save the men first and women and children second; you might want to go a different route.

There must be sufficient experts to whom crucial tasks can be allocated, so that the recovery systems don?t get overburdened, defeating the very purpose of a recovery plan. It is instructive to separate the disaster recovery (the tech side, essentially) from the overall business continuity plan, because this is a common mix-up among providers, who erroneously think they?re one-and-the-same.

What good is getting the servers back up-and-running, if the day-to-day operations, business-to-customer interaction elements, staff and communications are in shambles? You effectively would have a computer with no one to input the data. There are telling industry statistics which say that businesses that undergo a serious compromise in systems ? whether technical or organizational ? endure a half-year to 2 year downward spiral before failing completely if they didn?t have a business continuity plan in place when they were compromised. With this in mind, then, the real question isn?t whether or not you should invest in a BCP; but rather, which company you choose to implement it.

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Chris writes avidly about Disaster Recovery and Management issues for several different online brands. ?She also helps manage and operate a small little corner of Hubpages with an article on the Black Visa. ?It's a satellite of the larger website of a close college friend, which you can visit here at the Visa Black Card. ?Those are just hobbies though; she's a techie at heart.

Source: http://article-marketing-tools.blogspot.com/2012/08/business-continuity-after-disaster-bcp.html

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