Business Continuity Planning (“BCP”) is about identifying those parts of your organisation that you can’t afford to lose - typically data, systems, premises and people – and planning how to maintain these, if an incident occurs.
Any incident, large or small, whether it is natural, accidental or deliberate, can cause major disruption to your organisation. As always, prior planning enables you to get back to business in the quickest possible time.
Outages, failures and delays caused by foreseeable events lead to short and longer term personal, financial and reputational cost.
BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING
What we do
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The first step is to define the scope of the BCP, ensuring that the critical elements of the business are included and cover the key risks of the organisation. This requires a RISK assessment and will be measured against the risk register in place.
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The critical systems, activities and resources required for the business to operate need to be classified, graded and scenario considered, this forms the basis for the recovery strategy and action plan.
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At this stage we are able to work out design recovery strategies that maintain business critical activities that are proportionate to the risk and are cost effective for the business.
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Plan and implement the agreed strategies, including any required change management plan to ensure that the structure, resources and processes are in place to form a recovery should it be required.
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Once in place it is important that the BCP is kept up to date. This plan will be relied upon in the event of critical issues in the business therefore we put in place a plan to Train, Test & Maintain, allowing our clients to continue the work after we have completed ours. This can involve specific training sessions that will be evaluated to ensure that your business capabilities meet the needs.
Our comprehensive consultancy process involves:
Highlighting the critical business areas and functions that should come in-scope of Business Continuity Planning;
Understanding the nature of these critical systems, activities and resources and what is required to maintain them;
Identifying the most likely risks that have, will or could occur;
Design recovery strategies that maintain business critical activities that are proportionate to the risk and are cost effective;
Plan and implement the agreed strategies, including any required change management plan; and
Testing the systems and setting up an ongoing review and test process.