Analysys Mason’s business continuity planning (BCP) advice provides a foundation and guides processes to maintain and recover key business functions when operations have been threatened or disrupted, in effect a blueprint for business survival.
We assist our clients with identifying threats and risks, and reduce their potential impact through:
- understanding our clients’ key business operations
- developing a comprehensive threat and risk assessment
- devising mitigation strategies or other contingencies to ensure as near as possible normal business is quickly resumed.
We have extensive experience and expertise in helping our clients to assess their operations, and devise effective and economically optimal BCP, including an important element known as Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP), more usually meant to apply to planning for the recovery of an organisation’s ICT systems following a major failure.
With the support of senior management, and using the detailed operational knowledge and experience of staff, we work with our clients through a staged process:
- We develop a deep understanding of the key operations and processes through which the organisation meets its objectives, and serves its customers. This is followed by an examination of the causes and effects of disruptions, and assessing the risk of each – an important factor here is the time criticality of the loss of one or several processes, and when normal or replacement services are implemented.
- We identify available strategies and contingencies for mitigation of or response to the impacts of service affecting incidents. Detailed cost benefit analyses will be used as part of a systematic options appraisal, all of which must accord with the organisation’s appetite for risk and the nature of their business or the markets they serve.
- We develop the BCP, which must be an action document that drives activity. The plan must be tested to ensure it is robust and resilient, against the full range of envisaged scenarios. There may be iteration between this and previous stages to arrive at the optimal solution.
- Once the planning is in place, organisational climate and culture change needs to ensure that BCP becomes an integral part of daily operations – this includes gaining senior management buy-in and support as well as establishing training for staff and ensuring BCP change impacts are embedded into future projects.
- With a plan in place there must be regular testing, review and maintenance updates of the plan to counter changes in technology, legislation or other business environment aspects. Periodic review and testing is crucial here to ensure any response is appropriate and at the very least adequate.
