B.C.G

Recently occurred man-made and natural disasters such as terrorist
attacks, the threat of pandemic flu and the Indian Ocean Tsunami, all
contribute to highlight the significant need for the public as well as
commercial organizations alike to have Business Continuity Plan. The
Civil Contingencies Act of UK’s government specifies the requirement of
thorough Business Continuity Management and the new BSI standard will
help in the implementation of best practice but it will not overcome
some of the implicit major issues of BCP. The most prominent issue is
the complexity that covers the interactions and interdependencies that
gives a clear definition of business critical processes for modern
organizations while ensuring that stakeholders are well-versed and are
aware of their roles and responsibilities, moreover, managing the array
of policies that directs your BCP.

Effective Business Continuity Plans for Enterprises must be
communicated by a clear understanding of the critical processes that
must be conducted in an organization for the achieving business aims and
key supporting objectives. For making sure that business processes are
adequately safeguarded, business continuity planners must have a
comprehensive knowledge of all business-critical elements of the
organization such as their relationships, relative priority to the
business, and interdependencies so as to identify, access and
appropriately planning can be done against the risks. If the Business
Continuity Analysis will be incomplete, the organization will be
vulnerable to the critical failures.

The main goal of Business
Continuity Management is to develop the ability to maintain continuation
in your business critical activities even after a disaster occurring.
Hence, it becomes essential for ensuring that your organization is
prepared with an effective business continuity plan in place and also
that any third party supplier of critical role have adequate plans for
ensuring the continuation of the service to a well defined Service Level
Agreement. Once you have acknowledged all the potential threats to your
organization, it is quite obvious that you don’t want suppliers to be
the representatives of weak links in your continuity chain.

If you will not be having a clear understanding about your
business-critical processes, or your businesses’ ability for the
identification of the systems, infrastructure elements as well as people
upon which all these processes depend, it will not be possible for you
to figure out the impact of a particular threat? If you are not
confident enough about the understanding of such areas, how can you be
sure that you none of the business-critical element has been overlooked
in your planning process and, therefore, that the Business Continuity
plans, which are developed by you are truly effective?

It is not
at all worthy to spend all the time, effort and cost in development of a
BCP unless it is effectively communicated with everyone including key
partners, employees, and suppliers, and possibly customers. BCP is
therefore not a one-off process; there is need of plan distribution
among all relevant parties so that they can go through it, understand it
and practice them at appropriate situations. Not only this, a plan must
be kept up-to-date and relevant to the business.