What is Business Continuity Planning (BCP) & Why is it Important?

It’s always important to prepare for a worst-case scenario. Just because we focus on building reliable IT Solutions, it doesn’t mean we don’t think about what would happen in the worst-case scenario. Preparation is key, which is why we always consider our customers business continuity options and help to ensure they are fit for purpose.

What is Business Continuity Planning?

Business Continuity Planning (BCP), is the planned process of preventing and recovering potential threats to a business. As well as preventing, the goal on BCP is to enable ongoing operations before and during the execution of your disaster recovery plan.

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) should go hand in hand with your continuity plan. BCP focuses on the impact on your technology infrastructure in the event of a disaster. See my other blog post on what a business recovery plan is and why it’s essential to backup your data in the right way.
So, you’ve got a BRP. But have you considered the full recovery from the impact of the disaster in question? Your business continuity plan.

Example Scenario: Recovering from a Flood

Imagine that your office has suffered a flood, it will remain inaccessible for months, how will you continue?
A good business continuity plan will cover all significant incidents. Such as Fire, Theft, Flood and Cyber-attack. It will also have a plan for the loss of a critical system. When thinking about a good BCP, you should think about the following:

• Office Space
• IT Systems
• Telecoms
• Mail and Delivery’s
• Employee Access

Simple Recovery with the cloud

As an example, I’ll explain a little bit about our business continuity plan at Fabric IT.
We host all our systems in the Microsoft Azure Datacentre. Where is the data stored? It depends on your region; you can figure it out on this site. If we can’t access our office and hardware inside is damaged, we can continue to run the business, and all staff can work from home or remotely. Calls can divert to mobiles through our VoIP system, and data would be accessible through business devices or web applications depending on the individual’s circumstance. With data in the cloud, it’s possible to keep your business running as usual. Choosing to host in Microsoft’s Datacentre was an easy decision from a BCP point of view due to their 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Read more… what’s right for your business, on-premise or cloud servers?

If you’d like a chat about developing your business continuity plan, don’t hesitate to get in touch.