Business Continuity For Dummies

Introducing the Idea of Business Continuity

We’re going to keep things simple, as we try to do throughout this book; in fact doing so is pretty easy because BC is in the main pretty straightforward. Business continuity is understanding your business, devising strategies based on this knowledge and recording these strategies into plans to enable you to trade through a disruption and recover afterwards.

Whatever the size of your business, the key principles of BC and the steps to follow remain the same:

1. Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Understanding your business so that you’re able to work out what’s really important to it and the activities that produce these aspects or make them happen. In this part you identify:

• Your key products and services

• The critical activities on which they depend

Flip to the next section, ‘Revealing the Key Terms and Concepts’, where we define these terms for you. Also, Chapter 4 has loads more on BIA.

2. Maximum tolerable period of disruption, recovery time objective and then recovery point objective: The next part of your BIA is working out these three items, which are when you need to resume your critical activities, your objective time for resuming them and the level or point to which you need to resume them.

3. Risk assessment: Looking at the risks to the critical activities of your key products and services. Assess Chapter 5 for more about ...