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Business continuity planning is the process whereby organizations ensure the
maintenance or recovery of critical operations, including services to customers,
when confronted with adverse events such as natural disasters, technological
misuse or failures, human error, or terrorism.
In business continuity planning, we consider every critical aspect of the
business in creating a plan for how it will respond to disruptions. It is not
limited to the restoration of information technology systems and services, or
data maintainedvin electronic form, since such actions by themselves cannot
always put an institution back in business.
Impact Analysis: A business impact analysis (BIA) is the first step in developing a
BCP. The BIA phase identifies the potential impact of uncontrolled, non-specific
events on the institutions business processes. The BIA phase also determines what
and how much is at risk by identifying critical business functions and prioritizing them.
Risk Assessment: The risk assessment is the second step in developing a BCP. If the
threat scenarios developed are unreasonably limited, the resulting BCP may be
inadequate. During the risk assessment step, business processes and the business
impact analysis assumptions are stress tested with various threat scenarios.
Risk Management: After conducting the BIA and risk assessment, management should
prepare a written BCP. The plan document strategies and procedures to maintain,
resume, and recover critical business functions and should include procedures to
execute the plans priorities for critical vs. non-critical functions, services and processes.
Other Policies, Standards and Processes: These include Systems Development Life
Cycle (SDLC), change control and data synchronization, employee training and
communications planning, insurance and government impact.
Risk Monitoring: Risk Monitoring is the final step in business continuity planning. Risk
monitoring ensures a BCP is viable through testing, independent review, and periodic
updating. The objective of a testing program is to ensure that the BCP remains
accurate, relevant and operable under adverse conditions.
For more information about Business Continuity Planning solutions and services contact us at:services@netfast.com or call 718-706-4140.
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