Building capacity and resilience with business continuity services is among the top priorities for most organizations today. Yet, it is a kind of service continuously evolving, with new technologies involved and a whole new vocabulary of terms defining all the parameters included.  

 

We are taking this opportunity to track a few common business continuity (BC) terms and elaborate on them.  

Should you have more questions, please do not hesitate to contact our team via this form. 

 

Business Continuity terms to remember 

Awareness: Understanding of basic business continuity parameters, issues, and limitations as they are understood by all parties involved.  

 

Coordinator: The person entitled to manage planning and implementation for overall recovery of an organization.  

 

BC Lifecycle: The stages that an organization goes through in order to improve resilience with a comprehensive business continuity plan.  

 

BC Maturity model: A method of evaluating whether BC activities have become standard within an organization.  

 

Business Interruption costs: The impact on a business caused by different types of sudden interruptions (eg. energy outage, natural disasters).  

 

BC risks: Anything that can derail a well-matured business continuity plan.  

 

Call tree: A document describing the calling responsibilities for personnel when a BC plan is activated. For example, it depicts the calling order towards other employees, customers, vendors, banks, etc.  

 

Cascade system: A plan according to which people involved in the execution of a BC plan reach out to other involved parties as necessary.  

 

Cold site: A data center work area fully ready to accommodate the equipment by key employees aiming to resume business operations. Usually, this work area provides all appropriate environmental conditioning, connectivity, communication access, and configurable fundamentals.  

 

Drop ship: A strategy for delivering equipment, supplies, and materials at the time of a business continuity event.  

 

Exclusion zone: An area that is controlled by emergency services in case of a major disruption.  

 

First responder: Α key member of an organization assigned with providing all the necessary answers to everyone else involved.  

 

Grab list: A list of items that individuals should take before evacuating a building, without compromising personal safety. Items are always related to details in the business continuity plan and its execution. 

 

Human continuity: The support an organization provides to its people before, during, and after a business continuity event.  

 

Invocation: A word often used for declaring that an organization’s business continuity plan needs to be put into effect.  

 

Lead time: The time it takes for a supplier to make goods or services available during the execution of a business continuity plan. 

 

Marshalling area: A designated area where people and physical resources can be gathered while waiting for further instructions.  

 

Orderly shutdown: The process of shutting down business properties in an organized way, based on the principles of a business continuity plan.  

 

Validation script: Carefully designed procedures used – according to a business continuity plan – to crosscheck and validate the proper function of a system and/or process before bringing it back into operation.  

 

Workaround procedures: Alternative procedures that may be used by a business unit in order to continue to perform during temporary unavailability of related critical functions.  

 

Got questions on business continuity? Contact us here.