Business Continuity
Companies large and small need a Business Continuity Plan. And as the business changes this plan must be reviewed on a periodic basis to insure it meets the current needs of the company. Here at Zombie Data we have a methodology for building or reviewing a Business Continuity Plan. This methodology includes Education on Business Continuity Planning, Risk Analysis, Review of Business Management Structure and Communications, Review of Primary and Secondary Business Functions/Processes, Review of IT Infrastructure and how this maps to the business, etc. Each of these segments are important and depending on the answers given often spur other questions to consider. By reviewing your firm's IT Infrastructure the obvious question of appropriate Disaster Recovery plans is initiated. Depending on the size of your IT Infrastructure this can be simple or exceedingly complex. Building or reviewing a Business Continuity Plan is an interogative process which should extend down throughout the management levels of your organization to make certain all the appropriate business requirements are correctly identified.
Education on Business Continuity Planning
When a firm first decides to create a Business Continuity Plan it is imperative that all parties involved are on the same page. If different groups have different expectations then the process can be muddied. Whether you are using our services or not to create your plan, Zombie Data offers Education sessions for managment teams to walk them thru the basics of a Business Continuity Plan, review items that should be identified, reviewed, discussed and actions decided upon. As part of this Education session will provide your firm with our Business Continuity templates along with the worksheets we use to collect the information. We will walk your team thru many of the options available to them.
Risk Analysis
This is one of the initial steps and easiest to demonstrate. There are many events that can impact your firm and to create a business continuity plan a smart business owner tries to identify as many of these individual risks as possible, determine likelihood of each item, impact if the item should occur, and determine if each individual risk can be accepted or should be mediated in some way. Reviewing mediation alternatives and then selecting the right solution for your firm based on a multitude of variables including functionality, reliability, and cost. During a periodic review each item that was originally identified should be revisted as it is quite possible for an item's likelihood to occur or a companie's risk tolerance to that item to change over time. Additional items that were not initially identified may also be added.
For some firms the final Business Continuity Plan may be fairly simplistic, you may have a higher tolerance to risk, etc. Realize that there is no one size fits all answer. Even if we looked at 10 firms within the same general Gross Sales range, say $5-10MM, I would expect to get 8-10 different sets of Business Continuity plans. What is a major risk to one industry may be inconsequential for others.