Business continuity plan template

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) sets out your critical business functions which must continue to operate in the event of a disaster.

This essentially means that when a flood, power outage, or natural disaster hits, your business can continue operating whilst having the resilience to recover quickly.
A business continuity plan also enables a business to plan for disruptions well in advance, therefore, limit their potential business impact.

There are three primary aspects to a business continuity plan:

1. Seamless transition

A business continuity plan should ensure a seamless transition of the team to a secured site during a disaster. Interactive’s disaster recovery and serviced office solutions are customisable to let you build a solution that is right for your business.

2. Continuous connectivity

In the event of a major disruption, every business will have specific needs to restore its day to day business operations. Interactive offers alternative premises, system restoration, and backup solutions to enable continuous connectivity with key customers and suppliers. 

3. Disaster recovery 

As Australia’s largest business continuity solutions provider, Interactive offers expert designed and tested disaster recovery plans to ensure minimal downtime. 

Why is business continuity planning important?

Building a resilient organisation takes investment and planning.

No one wants to think about the worst-case scenario but planning for a business disruption such as a natural disaster or can help your business mitigate risk when it is the most vulnerable.

Having a disaster recovery plan in place is a critical part of any modern business practice, and a well thought out contingency plan could be the difference between a company continuing operations or not.

Downtime is costly for any business but knowing what to do during a disaster can help act quickly and rationally. 

This preparation is known as developing a business continuity plan (BCP).  A business continuity plan (BCP) can prompt you to consider all the critical-business processes and key functions  you need to keep your organisation running. 

What should a business continuity plan include

Every organisation needs a business continuity plan (BCP) to establish the steps that are needed to manage and respond to a major disruption.

When developing a business continuity plan, you need to make sure that it includes all the 

vital information and continuity strategies you need to respond effectively to emergency situations. 

Understanding the threats to your business and the costs of responding to potential emergencies are key to this type of planning. 

Here are some key factors to take into account when you are creating business continuity and risk management plans: 

1. Identify internal key contacts

Identifying the internal resources that are needed to keep business operations running is the first step of a business continuity plan. A company needs to determine the key skills, knowledge, and expertise needed to recover.

2. Create a business impact analysis

A business impact analysis identifies critical-business processes, resources, and any relationships across a business. This is used to quantify the potential impact if a disruptive event should occur. Once this is clearly defined, you can determine alternative strategies to mitigate any losses.

3. Determine  any threats

Threats to your business come in different forms; human error, natural disasters or even cyber-attacks. Taking into account these factors that are both in and out of your control form part of a risk management assessment. Assessing the likelihood of each identified threat along with the potential damage they can cause your business, will help your business to prioritise what threats to focus on and then develop the needed business processes to recover effectively.

4. Consider your supply chain

Make sure you have considered your obligations to your customers, particularly any contractual or compliance requirements, such as service level agreements (SLAs). You need to ensure you have identified your critical suppliers, what might happen if their services are disrupted, who you need to contact in the event of a disaster, and their agreed responsibilities and recovery strategies.

5. Regularly test and update 

A business continuity plan is not a set and forgets approach and instead, regular testing needs to be carried out. When a crisis hits, your business will rely on these step-by-step procedures and responses outlined in your BCP, which needs regular updates to make sure that it remains relevant.

How to create a business continuity plan

A thorough business continuity plan can help businesses prepare for the unpredictable and be the difference between success and failure for the company.

Here are three key steps to keep in mind when  putting together a business continuity plan.

1: Identify your business-critical assets

To build an effective business continuity plan, an organisation must identify its most critical assets whether that’s people, processes, or technology. 

2: Conduct a threat assessment

The next step involves performing threat modelling to identify and assess the potential threats that could compromise your business-critical assets. 

3: Conduct a risk assessment

Identify the risks to your assets by consolidating the outputs of the previous two steps to understand the likelihood and impact (risk = likelihood x impact).

Interactive’s business continuity template provides a high level overview of the fundamental steps in putting together this plan. You can download the template here. 

A business continuilty template built by experts for all businesses

When disaster strikes, you want a partner who will minimise your downtime and help your business stay compliant.

With over 30 years of experience in risk management and disaster recovery, our experts have helped companies regain business operations and critical systems, and plan for the future. 

The business continuity template will help you:

• Define clear business objectives
• Identify areas of business vulnerable
• Find the best resources available in the implementation of your plan
• Identify recovery solutions for every potential business threat
• Create a go-to list of key contacts that can act as soon as business interruptions ariseDownload your business continuity template today and create a resilient future for your business. Contact the Interactive team to schedule a meeting and Business Continuity facility tour.