¶ … Disaster Planning Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Planning models

Business continuity and disaster planning

The goal of business continuity planning is to ensure that during an unexpected event, the business is able to run as smoothly as possible. These unexpected events may run the gamut from "the failure of a supplier of goods or services or delayed deliveries" due to extreme weather to a security breach of the computer systems to a national attack or major disaster (BIA, 2012, FEMA) "A business impact analysis (BIA) predicts the consequences of disruption of a business function and process and gathers information needed to develop recovery strategies" (BIA, 2012, FEMA). To conduct a BIA, the organization should first determine the potential timing of a disaster, or to "identify [the] point in time when interruption would have greater impact" followed by the "duration of the interruption or point in time when the operational and/or financial impact(s) will occur" (BIA worksheet, 2012, FEMA).

Then, the organization must determine the operational impact of the event which may include lost or delayed sales and income; increased costs to deal with the problem; fines and legal fees;...

Then, the costs of the likely disasters should be "compared with the costs for possible recovery strategies" (BIA, 2012, FEMA).
The Business Continuity Maturity Model® (BCMM®) is a specific, trademarked tool "created to help organizations to improve the resiliency of organizations and to develop and maintain a sustainable continuity program" and identifies eight domains that are critical to disaster recovery (COOP: How resistant are you, 2012, Virtual Corporation). These domains are then 'rated' on a scale from very low to high. The domains include leadership; employee awareness; the scale and appropriateness of the BC program; pervasiveness of the BC programing; use of metrics to monitor BC performance; commitment of resources to a BC program, and external coordination (COOP: How resistant are you, 2012, Virtual Corporation).

The BIA and the BCMM assume that some types of disruptions in business strategy are inevitable, and the best way to protect one's self against losses is to anticipate them and to reduce the damage…