Create a business continuity plan
1. Create a business continuity plan
Imagine a software company is using cloud resources to host their applications when a large storm strikes a data center, taking the company’s resources offline. It’s important for the business -and its customers- to get the cloud environment back up and running quickly. That’s where a business continuity plan comes in. A business continuity plan, also called a BCP, is a document that outlines the procedures to sustain business operations during and after a significant disruption. BCPs can minimize damage from disruptions like natural disasters or cyber attacks. A disaster recovery plan, or DRP, is an important part of each business’ continuity plan. A DRP is a plan that allows an organization’s security team to outline the steps needed to minimize the impact of a security incident. While BCPs focus on keeping a business going during a disruption, DRPs focus on recovering assets and data after the disruption. Let’s explore some impacts that business continuity planning can help prevent or mitigate. Business continuity planning can decrease the financial impact of a disruption, since it helps an organization get back to normal quickly. It can also mitigate brand impact and reputation loss. The sooner an organization recovers from a disruption, the less it affects their customers. And that keeps customers happy with the organization and likely to keep using its services. Let’s explore the steps to develop a business continuity plan. Departments throughout an organization usually collaborate to create a BCP, with each department planning for their own operations. Leadership helps to keep the plan in line with the company’s goals. The first step in building a business continuity plan is to determine the most critical apps and data for business function. You can organize these resources into tiers based on importance. For example, let’s say you’re helping create the BCP for your employer, a financial institution. If your online banking app goes down, your customers won’t be able to access their accounts from their phones -this means the banking app is a high priority. By contrast, let’s say the financial institution stores archived employee newsletters in a cloud storage bucket. If the storage bucket goes offline, your company can still continue its operations and your customers won’t be affected: It’s a lower priority. After ranking the most important apps and data, the second step is to identify acceptable amounts of downtime for each one. You can do this by assigning recovery time objectives. A recovery time objective, or RTO, is the target time allowed for the recovery of a service in the event of a disaster. The services most critical to your organization’s operations should have the shortest RTOs. You should also assign recovery point objectives to your applications. A recovery point objective, or RPO, is the maximum acceptable length of time during which data might be lost from an application due to a major incident. The longer an application is offline, the more data will be lost, so you should assign the shortest RPOs to the most critical data. The third step in developing a business continuity plan is to conduct a risk assessment to identify what risks could affect your resources. Next up, the fourth step is to document your disaster recovery plan. This plan should include solutions to recover your operations as soon as possible, including steps to restore backup data. It should clearly define each team member’s role in the event of a disruption. You should include contact information for your cloud service provider, backup providers, and key personnel who will be involved in restoring operations. After developing a BCP, the fifth step is to communicate the plan with others on the security team and throughout the organization, so everyone is familiar with how their role fits within the overall strategy. Finally, the sixth step is to regularly test and update both your BCP and your DRP. Testing should include simulation drills of different scenarios with the security team and throughout the organization. You’ll want your plan to cover any type of event, from small malfunctions to complete shutdowns. Business continuity planning is an ongoing job. It’s important to update business continuity plans regularly to make sure they keep up with any changes to the business or its IT infrastructure. I hope you had fun learning to create an effective business continuity plan! You’re ready to help your organization keep operations going, no matter what!2. Let's practice!
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