Business Continuity Management

Introduction to Business Continuity Management

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a process developed to counteract systems failure. It is not just about the recovery of IT systems and services, it is an organisation wide discipline. Business continuity management is a business issue, with benefits for any organisation. Supporting the ability of the business to recover - is disaster recovery.

This includes:

• Providing facilities and services to enable the business to continue to function
• Providing critical IT applications and infrastructure necessary to support the recovery of critical processes Underpinning the recovery is crisis management. This ensures that:
• The most appropriate personnel are brought together to manage the immediate effects and the wider implications of an incident
• Decisions on what should be recovered (and how this should be done) are made based on information provided by other areas of the business. For example, the IT department, Human Resources, etc

Once a business continuity management plan has been implemented, it is the start of an ongoing commitment. Organisations constantly evolve and change and recovery strategies must evolve with them. For example:

• Business processes change, people join, transfer and leave organisations on a regular basis. Plans should be updated to reflect changes in recovery teams
• New IT systems are introduced to support business activities. These may be essential and, as such, the requirement to recover them must be considered before implementation
• Ongoing training and testing is vital to ensure effective recovery

This guide is for: any business that wants to plan a strategy for continuing to operate effectively following a disaster. It covers: the benefits of BCM, and a ten point plan to help you implement a disaster recovery operation.