Template Business Continuity Plan

Recognizing that some services or products must be continuously delivered without interruption, there has been a shift from Business Resumption Planning to Business Continuity Planning.A business continuity plan enables critical services or products to be continually delivered to clients.Having a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) in place can protect your company from financial and reputational damage by equipping you with the tools to resume normal business functions in the face of disruption.

Recognizing that some services or products must be continuously delivered without interruption, there has been a shift from Business Resumption Planning to Business Continuity Planning.A business continuity plan enables critical services or products to be continually delivered to clients.Having a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) in place can protect your company from financial and reputational damage by equipping you with the tools to resume normal business functions in the face of disruption.

For more detailed information on creating your Business Continuity Plan download our comprehensive template.

Alternatively, you can learn more about Business Continuity Consulting from Sungard AS.

What you incorporate in this section will depend on what is layed out in the scenarios above, but it will provide users with important paperwork and further information to successfully implement each procedure efficiently.

This section could include maps of meeting points, incident report forms, declaration procedures and instructions on contacting vendors and customers.

The checklist guides you through the process and ensures you obtain the maximum benefits from your test or exercise. This assessment guides you through the normally complicated task of understanding the risks to your business and what controls measures are appropriate.

Your first step is to find a Business Continuity Plan Template that fits your organization’s needs.Include the purpose and objectives of the document, detailing what and who it is for (e.g.the processes required to resume normal business services and the timeframe in which this should happen).Instead of focusing on resuming a business after critical operations have ceased, or recovering after a disaster, a business continuity plan endeavors to ensure that critical operations continue to be available.September 11, 2001 demonstrated that although high impact, low probability events could occur, recovery is possible.Although they differ in goals and functions, BCP can be applied by all organizations.A Business Resumption Plan describes how to resume business after a disruption.Start this section with summarizing all your scenarios and the proposed recovery strategies (e.g.in the event of a network outage, systems should failover onto our DRaa S provider's environment).Lay out the scope of your plan, which areas of the business it covers, scenarios addressed and any key personnel and vendors it affects.It is also a good idea to use the introduction to note down the revision and test history of the BCP, other locations where it is stored and useful contact details so that this information is immediately available to users in the event of a disruption.