What Is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan is the bible of the organization used to continue operating during an unexpected outage or disruption. It is more thorough compared to a disaster recovery plan.


What Should a Business Continuity Plan Include?

The simple answer is that a business continuity plan should include everything that could possibly disrupt your service in case of an IT outage or a direct attack on the system infrastructure of your business. The ultimate objective is to avoid IT downtime, which costs an average of $5,600 per minute. The second element that should be included in your document is data preservation, especially sensitive information on your clients, partners, and customers.


What Is a Business Continuance Plan?

An ideal business continuance plan involves not only recovery but, more importantly, prevention. IT managers should not assume that everyone knows what to do in the aftermath of a catastrophe. The document should identify the risks and threats that could put the business in peril. Finally, the IT department should continuously test and update the plan to address new challenges.


What Should Be in a Business Continuity Plan?

The business continuance plan document should include a business impact analysis. It should also identify the personnel, processes, providers, resources, location, and applications that are mission-critical to your business. It should also incorporate prevention and mitigation measures to try to thwart or minimize the risks and threats, as well as emergency response.


What Is the Difference between a Business Continuity Plan and a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A straightforward way to differentiate the two is that business continuity is proactive while disaster recovery is reactive. As such, the business continuity plan is a more comprehensive document compared to recovery.


What Is the Difference between Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is a series of systems and steps to get the critical process of the IT infrastructure working in the aftermath of a catastrophe. In contrast, the business continuity plan seeks to resume full functionality for the entire system, and is not only restricted to IT.