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Why Your Business Can’t Live Without a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) By David Mack
When I mention to you the term, Business Continuity Plan (BCP), what thoughts enter your mind? Perhaps your plan is well in place, with drills run a couple of times a year to measure your response and effectiveness. Maybe you have been thinking about this, but running the day‐to‐day operations takes priority. On the other hand, what if your answer to the question is, “Uhhh…what is a Business Continuity Plan?” Never fear, I will offer you a high‐level definition, and state why a BCP must be amongst the top directives you initiate the next 12 months, regardless of your company size. A business continuity plan, simply put, answers the question, “How does the world see (your company name) as a relevant, functioning business entity in the event of a catastrophic break in business continuity?”
Now…, you, or your network resource may read this and say, “This BCP thing is just a fancy made‐up term for Disaster Recovery”. To be truthful, Disaster Recovery is part of the fully‐featured BCP. That is, a well‐documented BCP addresses unexpected events from simple environmental problems (e.g. electrical failures, IT system crashes) to personnel problems (e.g. 75% of your employees are out with the H1N1 virus, or the shop is on strike), up to yes, the F5 tornado or “The Big One” on the Hayward or San Andreas faults. A BCP is not a document to be conjured up over a weekend, or to be pushed to your IT Staff as a busy‐work assignment. A BCP is an executive‐level plan, and requires time and careful planning to build, and to maintain its effectiveness. The main goal of the BCP should be to document how your employees will communicate, how they will continue performing their roles, and where they will do so. The scope of BCPs very diverse, as an insurance broker may have different goals than that of an automobile dealership, for example. The elements of an effective BCP consist of Applications, Data, Servers, Power, Peripherals, and People.
SSmmaarrttFFooccuuss Of all the elements, it will be your people who will be the most difficult to build a BCP around. For example, you can decide where your data will reside, and where you will have access to computers with power should an unforeseen event take place, but will your employees really be thinking about coming to work tomorrow if their home was demolished today by that 9.1 earthquake? Maybe your BCP is well documented, with specific instructions on the where‐and‐how your corporate assets will be allocated. Perhaps this reading will give you the “shot across the bow” needed to begin discussions with your IT squad going into 2012. In either case, Congratulations! If we have managed to confuse you more than ever, but you find value in our message, we are happy to refer you to one of our outside trusted resources, who can help you answer the question, “How does the world see (your company name here) as a relevant, functioning business entity in the event of a catastrophic break in business continuity?” They will learn how you conduct business with your customers, and with your approval, develop a plan you can immediately deploy today, with scale toward addressing the most catastrophic of possibilities. David O. Mack is a Cisco Certified Network Associate for Smart Connect Technologies, Inc. To contact him, call 916 440 1213, or email at [email protected]. You can reach their website at www.smartconnecttech.com.