Imagine: you are planning the most important barbecue of your life. One that your big boss and parents-in-law will attend. Everything is ready, shining, marinating, only awaiting attendees to start enjoying the good food you’ve been preparing for days.
Suddenly clouds start gathering, a storm is about to wash all your hard work. What do you do? Being wise and prepared, you pull out a giant industrial canopy and deploy it over the whole area. The canopy is one of the key tools in your Barbecue, sorry, your Business Continuity Plan (BCP).
What is a BCP?
A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is essentially a strategy that a company develops to ensure it can keep running during a crisis or major disruption. This could involve anything from natural disasters and cyberattacks to unexpected financial or personnel issues. The main purpose of a BCP is to protect personnel and assets, and to make sure business operations can continue.
It's useful because it helps a business anticipate and plan for potential problems that could otherwise interrupt services or operations. This planning ensures that critical functions can keep going and that the company can maintain essential functions and services to its customers. A good BCP also aims to minimize the financial impact of these disruptions and help the business return to normal operations as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Think of it as the script for what every part of your organization should do when the unexpected happens. It is your company’s canopy against barbecue-ruining storms.
Why You Need a BCP
Without a BCP, your business is like being in a car without a safety belt. Sure, you might survive a crash, but do you want to leave the chance to the odds? Here are a few reasons why a BCP isn’t just a nice-to-have, but a must-have:
- Resilience: a BCP protects your business’s vital functions from unexpected shocks.
- Client Confidence: Clients stick with businesses that show they can handle a crisis.
- Regulatory Compliance: Depending on your industry, having a BCP might not just be smart; it might be the law.
- Peace of Mind: Knowing you have a plan in place lets you sleep better at night.
BCP building steps
A BCP build might seem like a daunting task but its main sequence is easy to apprehend:
- Risk Assessment: Identify what could go wrong. This is like checking the weather forecast before your big barbecue.
- Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Determine which business functions are critical and how quickly they need to be up and running post-disruption. The grill and salads should be ready before guests arrive, but the karaoke machine can wait.
- Recovery Strategies: Plan how to maintain operations. For instance, deploy the canopy.
- Plan Development: Just write the plan as a set of comprehensive checklists. Attach required data, templates and contact lists.
- Testing and Exercises: Regular drills keep the plan fresh and reveal any gaps. Think fire drills.
With a BCP
Let’s say a cyberattack locks you out of your customer data and systems. With a BCP, you and your team know who to call, how to switch to backup systems, and how to communicate with customers while you resolve the issue. It helps you define your MVC (Minimum Viable Company) which is a limited set of processes that must operate in order for your activity to continue.
It’s like having a spare key when you lock yourself out of your car — annoying, but not a disaster.
For some of us out there, having a ready-to-use BCP during a crisis can make the difference between thriving, just surviving or closing business. The average cost of a ransomware attack in 2023 was $4.45m (+2.3% vs 2022, +15.3% vs 2020). 15% of this cost is because of the ransom payment, the 85% remaining are because of the loss of activity. Limiting the cost of such an event is within acceptable reach. It starts with your BCP build process.
Conclusion
A Business Continuity Plan is about preparing for the worst while hoping for the best. A good BCP helps ensure that whatever the weather, your business can keep humming along, generating value, and keeping everyone, from stakeholders to employees, in high spirits and dry shoes. A BCP will not prevent the crisis. At Astran we usually say that it is unfortunately #notIFbutWHEN. What if with a little bit of extra work you had the tools to reduce its impacts when it strikes? So, don’t wait for the clouds to gather. Start on your BCP today, join Astran and define your Continuity Kits to keep your operations up, always. The next time there’s trouble, you’ll be the calm in the storm — umbrella in hand, ready to keep the party going.
