Business Continuity Planning:
All the Right Moves

Everywhere in today's business environment there are threatening concerns - of natural disasters, of man-made incidents both intentional and accidental, of power outages and telecommunications failures…and scores of other perplexities. To countermand these concerns, one needs a business continuity strategy - an overarching plan based on the ability to anticipate, to assess the measure of an opponent, and to know where threats (both internal and external) lie.

Your best move - the Risk Analysis - identifies the "how, what, and where" of potential risks and their accompanying consequences. A brief outline of sound risk analysis will serve as a framework for later discussions addressing BCP vertical market concerns in the manufacturing, healthcare, utilities, and pharmaceutical industries.

Identify and evaluate specific threats and risks that would have the greatest likelihood of occurrence within your business environment, and those that would have the greatest impact on your organization enterprise-wide. Be mindful that the geographies of any respective business locations possess their own unique risk scenarios, from environmental issues to political regimes, operational processes, and social and economic factors.

Define and classify disaster scenarios (typically geographically-oriented) to differentiate from preventive, impact-minimizing, and recovery solutions and choose the response strategy most applicable to your organization.

Assess the controls in place to reduce the impact probability of an identified threat. Typical controls include additional equipment like UPS systems, generator systems or lock down systems.

Perform a gap analysis in comparison to industry recognized best practices, and determine possible controls and risk management environment enhancements.