The Importance of Business Continuity Planning

Business Continuity Planning can offer protection from many potential risks that can threaten your company by disrupting critical business processes. These risks include traditional disasters like earthquakes, fires, floods, and tornados, as well as risks from terrorism (both physical and cyberterrorism), cybercrime, computer failures, theft and employee sabotage. Any one of these events can be extremely disruptive and detrimental to your business, yet all of the potential damage from each of them can be substantially minimized through business continuity management.

A business continuity management program is likely to increase your company's profitability as the primary focus of business continuity management is to minimize business process disruptions and financial loss during major and minor events. This translates into improved reliability and productivity for your company and consequently, a competitive advantage and increased market share.

Business continuity management is a relatively new term that is often thought of as interchangeable with "disaster recovery". In fact, business continuity management entails so much more. Business continuity management includes disaster recovery, business recovery, business resumption, contingency planning, emergency and crisis management.

The Benefits of Business Continuity Planning

• Identify and resolve structural problems within an organization.
• Gain a clearer understanding of your business processes.
• Address the "Backlog Trap" scenario before it occurs.
• Streamline business processes to insure easy recovery in the event of a crisis.
• Identify bureaucratic and inefficient structures.
• Create fast and effective communications systems.
• Establish minimum service levels for mission critical activities.
• Cost effectively focus your IT budgets for maximum resilience.
• Identify and prioritize critical business data and storage requirements.

Ray Fuller is the Founder, and a Principal, of ZoneCast, Incorporated. ZoneCast provides Corporate Information Security and Business Continuity Services. Ray has over twenty-one years of experience in a variety of technology fields related to information security, disaster recovery and business continuity management.

Since its inception, ZoneCast has successfully completed numerous consulting engagements in corporate information security, business continuity and disaster recovery for companies representing a diverse array of industries in several countries.