Computer Science

Topic Describe each of the elements of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP).

Read and respond to below two student’s discussions. (150 words for each response) reflecting on your own experience, challenging assumptions, pointing out something new you learned, offering suggestions

#1. Posted by Sai Srinivas

Most companies till now doesn't have any backout or disaster plan in their list. It's tough to grow higher and even a cyberattack can damage their information, money, stock price, customers and reputation. All this need to be demolished by having few key elements as part of their business plan called Business Continuity Planning (BCP). We will discuss more about the elements in BCP. Firstly, create a planning team - depends on the size of the team that includes all the required employees. Next one is perform a analysis on the business products - its key that the we always need to analyze if we need to alter any improvements and also, to calculate the impact for loss, interruption or discretion. Migitate risks and effective testing - testing always helps to find any security flaws and we can migitate the cyber risks.  Crisis communications and employee safety - these are very important because if a company hit by any cyber threat, communication should be fast and everyone must be updated and must be on the same page. At this moment, employee safety also comes into the picture as companies need to train them properly during these disasters operations. Establishment of the business continuity strategies and access to the business resources - Companies must create certain strategies based on the business impact analysis results, their goals, objectives, maintenance of supplier relationships and with policies and standards. Finally, IT operations at off-site locations, companies which are beware of these ransomware attacks, having storing their data as a backup in the offsite centers. This makes a better plan rather than thinking about the lost data and how to recover it - which cannot be done during the current times.

#2. Posted by Naresh

Business continuity planning (BCP) is the process involved in creating a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a business organization. The plan ensures that personnel and assets are protected and are able to function quickly in the event of a disaster due to natural causes or human-made mistakes. The important elements of  Business continuity process involves defining any and all risks that can affect the company's operations, making it an important part of the organization's risk management strategy. Risks may include natural disasters like fire, flood, or weather-related events, Power outages and cyber-attacks. Once the risks identified, BCP strategic steps must involve how those risks will affect operations, implementing safeguards and procedures to mitigate the risks and reviewing the process to make sure that it is up to date.

              There are seven key elements for Business continuity process which include from identifying risks, forming Disaster Recovery team and testing.

1. Establish a Planning Committee

The establishment of planning committee is depending on the size of the organization and a type of the business is doing. The emergency planning team may include communication manages, information technology director and manager, local fire and police department officials.

2. Conduct a Business Impact Analysis Business impact analysis (BIA) is a process used to identify, quantify, and qualify the impact of a loss, interruption, or disruption and it’s also identifies mission-critical activities and the time frame  like  Recovery time objective(RTO) and Recovery point objective(RPO) within which they must be recovered.

3. Mitigate Risk

Once the Business impact analysis process completed the next step followed by Mitigate the risks using strategies like Building construction, Security and fire protection systems, IT backup strategies and direct response sites and  Cross-training of personnel to plan to avoid time consuming processes.

4. Establish Business Continuity Strategies once the business continuity process for prepared then establish the steps like alternate practices to work at temporarily, use of secondary suppliers, work-at-home strategies, mobile offices and manual and alternate procedures if computer systems are down.

5. Develop Your Plan Record everything in the BIA process and develop a plan for disasters and emergencies. Deploying plan must include essential steps like Policy, purpose, and scope, goals and objectives and training, drills, and exercises.

6. Implement and Train

Implementing and training is one of the critical step in business continuity process as even though company has solid planning but responsible employees or people need to train for thi situation and understanding the steps and sharing in between different groups is very crucial to overcome disaster situation for business continuity.

7. Test the Plan

Test the strategic plan is also one of the important step as tis testing will give real experience for different individuals and teams to how to respond to the situation and at same time it will give opportunity to improve any lack of skills for Business continuity process.

By proper planning and analysis of possible risks according to nature of the business organization with through testing and training will help to implement Business continuity process in the event of disasters.