Business Continuity Plan PDF

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Business Continuity Plan Harshit Rawat Wilmington University

Business continuity refers to maintaining the business functions of an organisation or

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making an effort to resume the business functions to the earliest in the event of a major calamity. The calamity may be caused by natural disasters such as a fire, flood, earthquake or by human errors such as a cyber attack by cybercriminals. A good business continuity plan covers business processes, assets of the organisation, human resources, business partners and more. A business continuity plan not only outlines the procedures but also lays out the instructions for an organisation to follow during the time of disasters. There are six major plan development steps in a successful business continuity plan. Identification of the scope is the foremost step in a successful continuity plan. It includes the purpose of the project and how it will be implemented. Next comes the identification of the key business areas. This step includes the identification of those areas of a business without which the organisation business processes can be disrupted and the business functions may collapse. Identification of critical business functions is equally important. It is done to make sure that the important business functions are still functioning and running at the time of a disaster. Another step that is very critical for the implementation of a successful business continuity plan is to identify the dependencies between various business areas and business functions. It is important to identify such interdependencies to ensure that the multiple pillars of the organisations do not collapse while safeguarding one critical pillar of the organisation during the event of a disaster. Penultimate critical step is to recognise the acceptable downtime for all business functions. It is a very critical step as it determines the importance of a particular business function depending on how long can the organisation function without collapsing when the business function is not operational. The final step is to develop and maintain a plan to keep all the critical operations of the organisation up and running and avoid downtime of business operations (Lindros, Tittel, 2017).

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In my opinion, it is critically important for any small or medium sized organisation to have a business continuity plan as they are most prone to shutting shop in case of worst case risks of a natural or man made disaster. Databarracks, a cloud service provider concluded in a survey that only 30% of the small businesses have a business continuity plan which is a far smaller number as compared to the 54% of the medium sized organisation and 73% of the larger organisations. In the same survey, Databarracks mentioned that only a mere 25% of those 30% small organisations are able to reopen after a disaster. For a small or medium sized organisation, I would recommend to backup their data on a cloud server which are provided by many cloud based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) companies (Gran, 2015). Another suggestion That I would like to propose for a small organisation is to give some thought upfront for the disaster recovery and business continuity so that it is possible to minimise the downtime of critical business functions. I would recommend Wilmington university library to backup its data on a safe cloud platform and have periodic recovery operations on that data to make sure that the data is safely stored. Another recommendation that I would like to propose is to minimise the downtime of the library server so that more students can access the library resources simultaneously.

References ● Lindros. K., Tittel. E., (July 18, 2017) How to create an effective business continuity plan. Retrieved from: https://www.cio.com/article/2381021/best-practices/best-practices-

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how-to-create-an-effective-business-continuity-plan.html ● Gran. B., (July 26, 2015) Why your small business needs a Business Continuity Plan. Retrieved from: https://www.kabbage.com/blog/why-your-small-business-needs-abusiness-continuity-plan/...