Understanding risk and the business itself are the key factors for success for any organization leveraging the power of Business Continuity. Let’s read.

Running an effective Business Continuity program is not just simply an IT task, to be organized by people on the side of their main tasks. It is an impactful and significantly important project only for people who are willing to work on it full time and who understand business objectives, financials, and IT.

Sounds demanding? Yes, it is. In fact, an effective Business Continuity program can be successful only if the following strategic steps are taken into consideration:

Careful risk evaluation

The starting point for every Business Continuity program comes from the company’s leaders understanding the global environment and defining risks as clearly as possible. Then, the people handling the Business Continuity program are responsible to plan everything based on the risk assessment provided by senior leadership.

In this case, involved parties should always keep in mind that they have to be absolutely realistic in financial terms as well. The cost of organizing and running a Business Continuity program has to be proportional to the risks faced by the organization and to the maximum value of assets to be lost in case things go wrong. For example, if the value of assets to be lost is 50K and the Business Continuity program spending reaches 200K, executives have to redefine processes and objectives in order for the plan to have actual meaning.

Defining the roles of the teams

Training and educating all teams – the senior management including - is critical and very important for the success of a Business Continuity plan. However, while each and every team plays a role, not every company function’s involvement is time-critical. The Business Continuity team needs to develop a clear understanding of how each department works, of the key people, the facilities, the economics, and the technology used on a daily basis.

Creating a hierarchy based on the above significantly increases the Business Continuity’s plan feasibility and chances of success.

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