Risk & business continuity management

Business continuity planning, or business continuity and resiliency planning (BCP), is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. In addition to prevention, the goal is to enable ongoing operations before and during the process of disaster recovery. Business continuity is the intended outcome of proper execution of both business continuity planning and disaster recovery. 

Plans and procedures are used in business continuity planning to ensure that the critical organizational operations required to keep an organization running, continue to operate during events when key dependencies of operations are disrupted. Business continuity planning should protect the capability of an organization to continue the delivery of products or services at pre-defined acceptable levels, following a disruptive incident. As such, BCP is a subset of risk management. A Business Continuity Plan outlines a range of disaster scenarios and steps the business will take in any particular scenario to return to regular trade. BCP's are written ahead of time and can also include precautions to be put in place. Usually created with the input of key staff as well as stakeholders, a BCP is a set of contingencies to minimize potential harm to businesses during adverse scenarios.

Related Keywords: back-up plan, recovery plan, risk assessment, Business Impact Analysis, Recovery Capability Improvements, Response Capability improvements, supply chain risk management, hazards, threats