The ability to maintain essential operations during a disaster — whether it’s a natural disaster, disease outbreak, or another unexpected external event — and eventually revert to a fully operational state is crucial for any business, regardless of its size. However, such planning can require significant effort, financial resources, and the ability to adapt when the unexpected happens. In this publication series, you will learn about business continuity planning in depth. This series is for anyone who wants to start developing a fresh business continuity plan or improve their existing one. The operational aspects of business continuity are beyond the scope of this series but will be explored in the future.

Introduction

The International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 22301:2019 publication defines a business continuity plan as “Documented procedures that guide organizations to respond, recover, resume, and restore to a pre-defined level of operation following disruption”.

Businesses practice risk management when they keep everyday risks to operations to an acceptable level. However, such mitigations are not possible against disasters — this is where business continuity comes in. By documenting their priorities, businesses can continue to carry out essential operations during a disaster and eventually restore themselves to their pre-disaster state. 

The practice of business continuity gained wide acceptance after the unfortunate September 11 attacks (9/11). More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged businesses’ readiness for the unexpected. While it’s difficult for a business to maintain essential operations (especially physical ones) in a time like this, having a solid continuity plan could make the difference between continuing operations and shutting down.

Although it sounds complicated, business continuity planning, in simple terms, is getting to know your business and taking steps to make it as agile as possible (not physical location-centric and avoid a single point of failure on the critical areas) as possible.

Benefits

There are plenty of benefits to having a well-integrated, documented, tested, and revised business continuity plan and they outweigh the cost —  even in larger and geographically dispersed organizations. Smaller organizations should evaluate the cost versus the benefits and go ahead with something practical for their organization. 

Strategic Benefits

The strategic benefits of having a well-tested and practical Business continuity plan are immense; ranging from shareholder benefits to cost savings to new opportunities. Below is a non-exhaustive list of strategic benefits:

• Maintenance of regulatory compliance or government requirement in some countries

• Forge new partnerships with other organization and the wider community

• Makes the business resilient by incorporating business continuity thinking into the business activities

• Less money spent on ensuring the business overall

• Enhances the effectiveness of corporate governance during an unexpected disaster

• Enhances the reputation of the organization with the shareholders and stakeholders

• Provides new insight into the business operations to optimize

• Better IT Disaster Recovery strategies

• Well integrated, coordinated, and communicated Cybersecurity response during a crisis

Operational Benefits

Although continuity plans can seem like an avoidable overhead cost amidst regular operational activities, over time, the activities performed towards business resiliency simply become part of the routine. Business continuity also brings many unexpected operational benefits, including:

• Gaining a holistic understanding of the business process and related information systems 

• Having a fully tested alternative means of conducting the business

• Highlights gaps in overall business processes 

• Increases the amount of high-quality information  available during a crisis

• Cross-functional skill development among workers

• Development of a more agile approach to disaster recovery 

Challenges

Despite the benefits, there are some challenges — mostly due to a lack of knowledge about business continuity among business leaders (especially among private companies). Public companies and government institutions are typically mandated to have a fully operational continuity plan. Private companies respond reactively to a disaster, as a result of no preparation. Large organizations often face tough decisions when determining the amount of investment they are willing to make for preparedness. 

Below are some of the challenges that keep many businesses away from documenting a business continuity plan:

• Lack of understanding of the business benefits that Business continuity brings to the organization

• Dwindling management support due to the prolonged development phase and yearly maintenance required to keep the business continuity plan effective.

•  Versatile skills are needed

• Lack of commitment to keep the plan updated 

• Lack of standard processes that are predictable, easily transferable, and trainable Ad hoc technology investment process leading to the business requiring to reinvest to streamline their technology investments to aid better disaster recovery

• Implementation and maintenance is too expensive for some organizations

• Ensuring staff awareness and readiness is a never ending process 

• A lack of understanding of the organization’s critical processes

• Employee turnover

Conclusion

Every organization must give some thought into creating a business continuity plan, but plans should be realistic and flexible — not perfect.  To create an effective continuity plan, businesses must consider organizational strategy, context, stakeholders, technology, geographical location, appetite for developing a plan, benefits, and the challenges they might face.