A good definition of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is the creation of a strategy through the recognition of threats and risks facing a company, with an eye to ensure that personnel and assets are protected and able to function in the event of a disaster. Business continuity planning involves defining potential risks, determining how those risks will affect operations, implementing safeguards and procedures designed to mitigate those risks, testing those procedures to ensure that they work, and periodically reviewing the process to make sure that it is up to date.
In an ever-changing landscape for my customers, I find that a conversation that is coming up more and more is regarding business continuity and their ability to have good processes and procedures in place in case something negative were to happen. I understand that the easy route of this conversation is to focus on the negative and FUD in general, however, I like to focus on preparedness and general best practices.
In this conversation about being prepared there is often an overlooked piece by many of my customers that they feel intuitively about, but rarely confirm. This is the importance of the applications in their environment. In any situation where you press the big button and begin to shift workloads, what are the applications that you want to be able to use most quickly (provided everything works!)? Many times the primary applications are the ones focused on internal operations and or cashflow – applications that allow receiving and cutting of checks. Much like we have always asked for our customers to have the RPO/RTO conversation with the CEO to ensure that expectations are aligned, make a point to socialize what applications are needed and what Apps win from a priority standpoint. It is a good conversation to have and will most times start a good conversation regarding your posture to a disruption.
