How to Develop a Business Continuity Plan for an Enterprise Business

According to a Mercer survey, about 49% of businesses globally have a business continuity plan (BCP). However, the number of businesses with a BCP varies depending on the source and the type of business.

Enterprise businesses tend to be better prepared, especially when looking at rates of business continuity software adoption. However, enterprise businesses tend to have more intricate processes. Those processes need to be considered when developing a BCP.

So, how to develop a business continuity plan for an enterprise business? We delve into it in the following article.

What is a business continuity plan?

As noted, rates of business continuity planning have increased among enterprise businesses. However, there’s still ambiguity as to what a BCP actually does and what it contains.

The BCP provides a collection of resources, actions, procedures, and information, designed to prepare enterprises to maintain essential functions in the event of a disaster or other major disruption.

It’s executing on the business continuity plan specifically that enables the continuous delivery of critical services and products to customers.

What’s more, the demonstrated importance of business continuity management, especially in critical infrastructure sectors, has meant that jurisdictions have moved into mandate baseline business continuity management practices, often requiring firms to maintain a business continuity plan.

Of course, governmental actors aren’t the only stakeholders. Customers, be they existing or prospective, also have a vested interest in transacting business with organizations that will continue to deliver products and services at acceptable levels.

That’s one reason why developing a business continuity plan can offer firms a major competitive advantage in their market. It can also protect the brand in the eyes of shareholders and customers when an emergency does strike.

Why don’t all enterprises have BCPs already?

Sounds great. So, why isn’t enterprise business continuity planning universal?

Well, it’s complicated. For enterprises, the challenges to developing an effective business continuity plan are myriad.

Many enterprises simply lack a best-practice business continuity management program. There’s often a lack of commitment and involvement from senior management.

When C-level sponsorship is secured, it’s not always a given that senior leadership is fully invested in building a business continuity plan for the right reasons. Executives might be going through the motions, trying to feign compliance to regulators and customers.

Developing an effective business continuity plan

What’s more, enterprises also get business continuity planning wrong, too.

There’re plenty of variables that go into building a business continuity plan, so it’s easy to make the following common mistakes:

• Misjudge data recovery requirements
• Not properly tailor the risk assessment to organizational challenges
• Fail to question assumptions
• Fail to consider limiting factors

So, how to get business continuity planning right?

Well, for enterprises, business continuity planning involves documenting procedures to guide how the business will respond to and recover from a disruption. Putting together the actual business continuity plan will typically fall to the governance committee.

Here’s where C-suite involvement is crucial. Most governing committees are headed by an executive sponsor. That sponsor is nominally responsible for initiating, approving, auditing, overseeing, and testing the business continuity plan.

However, day-to-day management falls to a business continuity coordinator. In large enterprises, that coordinator might have a dedicated staff. Other in-house members of the committee typically include:

• CIO
• CISO or other senior security officer
• Senior representatives from the remaining business units

Before creating the business continuity plan, the governance committee will conduct a business impact analysis (BIA). This analysis systematically assesses business activities and the potential impacts of disruptions. Its goal is to help organizations identify and prioritize essential activities along with the processes and resources that support them.

Conducting this analysis is crucial. Companies may have a general idea of the products and services essential to maintain revenue, but senior management may not fully grasp the dependencies of those services.

A thorough BIA will document these dependencies and rank the priority of services or products for ongoing delivery or swift recovery. The findings from the BIA will inform the business continuity plan.

That plan will detail the necessary resources, services, activities, and software solutions to ensure the continuity of critical functions. The format of a business continuity plan can vary, but it typically includes the following components:

• Assumptions. Lists the necessary prerequisites for the plan’s effectiveness.
• Roles and responsibilities. Identifies individuals responsible for managing disruptions and those authorized to undertake specific actions, such as plan activation, urgent purchases, and media communication.
• Key contacts. Provides contact information for participants in executing the business continuity plan, often included as an annex.
• Plan activation and deactivation. Outlines conditions for activating the plan and the criteria for deactivation.
• Communication. Specifies communication methods between teams and stakeholders during a disruption, including designated communicators and guidelines for interacting with the media and government.
• Incident response protocols. Describes approaches for responding to disruptions.
• Physical sites and transportation. Lists primary and alternate sites for brick-and-mortar businesses, including assembly points and routes between sites.
• Order of recovery. Details all activities along with their Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).
• Recovery plans. Provides step-by-step actions and responsibilities for recovering personnel, facilities, infrastructure, software, information, and processes, including their interdependencies.
• Required resources. Compiles a list of necessary employees, third-party services, facilities, and equipment, along with responsibilities for providing each.
• Restoring activities. Describes the process for returning to normal operations once the disruption is resolved.

Business continuity testing

However, drafting the plan is just the beginning. Senior management must review and approve the draft before validating and updating the plan can start.

Validation involves conducting regular exercises and training to test the plan’s assumptions.

These sessions should be mandatory for all employees, and companies should aim for partner involvement throughout the business continuity plan lifecycle.

Testing should not be merely procedural. The plan must be a living document, requiring updates based on lessons learned from exercises.

Business continuity software considerations for a small business

Missing from these steps, however, is the digital technology needed to help enterprises plan for and respond to emergencies. That technology is called business continuity software.

For enterprises, business continuity software provides the following benefits:

• Identify risks. Helps enterprises identify potential risks and their negative impacts. 
• Create plans. Helps enterprises create and manage continuity and resilience plans. 
• Improve efficiency. Helps enterprises streamline and automate processes to make them more efficient. 
• Protect data. Helps enterprises protect critical information. 
• Promote collaboration. Helps enterprises facilitate collaboration and information sharing. 
• Improve response times. Helps enterprises respond to disruptions more quickly.

Of course, not all business continuity software is created equal. Enterprises should hone in on providers that offer some of the following functionality:

• Business impact analysis. Simplify your business impact analysis process and drive engagement across your organization using a built-in BIA tool that guides you through the process step-by-step, ensuring your BIAs are rich with insightful data to help you truly understand how your business works.
• Dependency mapping. Quickly identify dependencies between business activities and supporting assets or vendors and stay informed when one is at risk. Visualize and track dependencies to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions to mitigate risks effectively.
• Recovery strategies. Use a consistent recovery strategy across your organization, that allows you to define your strategies, response plans, roles and responsibilities, and pre-assigned checklists. Deploy these in seconds when disruption hits, to ensure the best response.
• Exercises and scenario testing. Don't wait for a real-world crisis to test your organization's readiness. With an advanced exercise management solution, you can be confident that teams are prepared to handle any situation that comes their way.
• Business continuity planning. Replace paper-based, static business continuity plans with dynamic, digitized business continuity plans that ensure your plans are always up-to-date and quickly available for all your users, on any device.
• Business continuity monitoring. Flexible dashboards and analytics capabilities ensure you always cater to your unique stakeholders, increasing visibility, transparency, and appreciation of business continuity across your organization.

But where to turn, specifically? We think Noggin.

Streamlined, integrated, automated business continuity software, Noggin enables enterprise businesses to remain prepared for adverse events and disruptions, facilitating engagement and collaboration across all stakeholders and ensuring a unified approach to resilience.

Don’t just take our word for it, though. See Noggin in action in a tailored software demonstration.