A business continuity plan helps maintain business operations after a disaster. Cyberattacks, data breaches, equipment failures, and natural disasters are all events that can shut down an organization's entire network, disrupting business operations.
Business continuity plans are implemented to help maintain business operations during and after a disaster.
Without a proper business continuity plan, your organization may experience disrupted business operations for a prolonged period, which can result in lost customers and revenue, and ramifications that violate legal compliance requirements.
To prevent these issues from happening, it is important to understand some testing exercises your organization can execute to strengthen its business continuity plan.
COEO understands how important business continuity is and has helped thousands of organizations with their business continuity plans so they can maintain business functions during and after a disaster occurs.
By the end of this article, you will understand what a business continuity plan is, the testing exercises to use to strengthen your business continuity plan, and whether these are appropriate for your organization.
What is a business continuity plan?
A business continuity plan is a documented business plan that outlines how a business will continue operations during and after a disaster occurs. Disasters such as cyberattacks, equipment failures, and natural disasters can occur at any time and often without warning.
Because of this, it is important to have a business continuity plan in place. A business continuity plan is essentially a “what if?” plan that puts together proactive strategies to maintain business operations even during emergency events.
Key components of a business continuity plan
Because business continuity plans cover many different areas of your business, there are different components of a continuity plan. The key components of a business continuity plan include:
Risk assessment
One of the components of a business continuity plan is a risk assessment, which identifies potential threats and vulnerabilities in your business operations.
Business impact analysis
Business impact analysis is another component of the business continuity plan that evaluates how different disasters and disruptions affect critical business functions and processes.
Recovery strategies
Recovery strategies detail how to restore operations, systems, and data after a disaster occurs using data backup plans and failover systems.
Communication strategy
The communication strategy is an important component of the business continuity plan that defines how to keep employees, customers, and vendors updated and informed during and after a disaster.
Employee roles and responsibilities
The last key component of a business continuity plan is to include the roles and responsibilities of each individual employee during and after the disaster recovery.
This outlines who does what during and after an emergency and sets the proper expectations for employees.
Testing exercises for a business continuity plan
Having a continuity plan is crucial for organizations to maintain business operations before and after a disaster.
However, if you are unaware of the testing exercises required to strengthen your business continuity plan, you may not be aware of the vulnerabilities that may exist.
Running test exercises also provides great experience for participants who have major roles in the business continuity plan. Because of this, it is important to choose the most knowledgeable people to be involved in the creation of the business continuity plan and testing.
These exercises also encourage healthy discussion and information sharing among different teams and departments to identify and fix vulnerabilities within the plan while encouraging creative fixes to different scenarios.
Some of the testing exercises to strengthen your business continuity plan include:
Business continuity plan walk-through
This test is typically conducted as a tabletop discussion. During the walk-through, employees are given a disaster scenario and they must work together to mitigate the situation by following the organization’s continuity plan.
This test helps employees figure out their roles and responsibilities within the plan and helps the organization identify any holes or vulnerabilities requiring updating and changes to improve the overall reliability of the plan.
For more insight into your business continuity plan, this walk-through exercise can also be facilitated by an external consultant.
This provides insight that is unbiased, helping discover vulnerabilities or holes in the plan as well as actions that should take place to improve the plan after the walkthrough that were not discovered previously in the internal walkthrough.
Full-scale continuity plan exercise
This exercise goes beyond the conference room and executes a real-world scenario for employees to participate in.
An example of this might involve an important server going down where team members must collaborate to identify the problem and recover or replace the failed server, reinstating systems running on the server and restore it to production status.
Is a business continuity plan appropriate for your organization?
Now you understand what a business continuity plan is and the testing exercises to strengthen business continuity plans. However, it is also important to understand whether a business continuity plan is appropriate for your organization.
If your organization is looking to implement a strategy that enables your business to maintain or resume business functions during and after a disaster, a business continuity plan may be a good solution.
Organizations that are looking to keep their network running and avoid network downtime by providing redundancy and resiliency should implement and test a business continuity plan.
If your organization discovers a potential threat in your network because of a risk assessment, a business continuity plan may be appropriate to avoid this and network downtime if the potential threat were to affect your infrastructure.
Additionally, business continuity is appropriate for organizations that are required to maintain compliance, such as HIPAA for healthcare organizations, which results in legal ramifications if your organization does not comply.
Finally, if your organization already has a business continuity plan in place, performing testing exercises to improve your plan will help avoid vulnerabilities and holes within the plan.
Implementing and testing a business continuity plan in your organization
Now you understand what a business continuity plan is, the testing exercises available to strengthen a business continuity plan, and whether a continuity plan is appropriate for your organization. This will help you determine if implementing and testing a business continuity plan will benefit your organization.
No organization can continue business operations during and after a disaster without a reliable business continuity plan in place. For this reason, it is important that your organization has a business continuity plan and performs testing exercises to minimize downed business operations during and after a disaster.
COEO understands how important a reliable continuity plan is and has helped thousands of organizations with their business continuity plan to maintain business operations during and after a disaster.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about business continuity or ask any questions you may have, you can schedule an appointment.
Now that you understand what a business continuity plan is and the testing exercises that will strengthen your plan, check out our continuity plan:
