What is Business Continuity Planning?
Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. The goal is to enable ongoing operations before, during, and after a disruptive event. People's safety is the first priority, after which the plan moves toward the processes that will keep the lights on.
The purpose of a BCP is to identify critical business functions and prepare alternatives to keep those operations running. The plan covers business processes, company assets, human resources, and key business partners to ensure that your services can continue with as little disruption as possible.
Why is a Business Continuity Plan Important?
For a business executive, a BCP is more than an operational document; it is a cornerstone of good governance. A well-executed plan protects brand reputation, maintains customer and stakeholder confidence, and ensures you can meet your legal and regulatory obligations during a crisis.
Conducting a formal business impact assessment will ensure that critical processes are clearly identified and their importance understood across the organization. This allows you to identify and mitigate risks related to financial loss or operational failure and can even uncover new opportunities for efficiency and growth.
Dynamo6 has a Business Continuity Plan in place, and below are a few key points that shaped the contingency plans for ourselves and our customers.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Our choice of technology partners provides our business with tools that are accessible from any location. For us, a key benefit of being cloud-based is that our infrastructure allows our team to work remotely using the same tools, just in a different location. This inherent flexibility is a core tenet of modern resilience.
We recommend reading AWS’s Well-Architected Framework, as well as Google Cloud’s Cloud Adoption Framework. The Dynamo6 team uses these as cornerstones for cloud migration projects, and we used their principles for our own BCP.
Setting Priorities
During any disruption, it is natural to expect changes in how your teams and clients work, and you must be prepared to prioritize around those needs. For us, this includes exercising systems designed for remote work and ensuring those systems can scale where required.
To define priorities for your business, you must conduct a business impact assessment (BIA). The BIA will identify key business areas, their importance level, and their acceptable downtime, known as a Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Once you’ve identified your priorities, communication is the most important aspect. Each instance a BCP comes into play is different, and having your teams on the same page with clear priorities will enable everyone to thrive in adapted ways of working.
Paying Attention
We use low-touch monitoring systems that inform us of system health across our networks. With very little effort, we can maintain monitoring to ensure systems stay online and provide a timely response if necessary.
For businesses with a large number of employees, monitoring the load and usage from so many people working remotely is critical, as is service monitoring to ensure everything is operating as it should. For Dynamo6 customers, we carefully monitor application and network performance to provide this visibility.
Adapting
Cloud services allow us to easily adapt infrastructure to meet our own and our clients’ changing work environments. We are able to right-size services to meet new working conditions or cost-optimise with changes in demand.
Another facet of adapting is providing the right tools to teams. Providing company-managed laptops and mobile devices enables the business to govern the applications and hardware being used to access company information. It also provides the flexibility needed for a modern, remote-first workforce. A challenge of remote work can be preventing "shadow IT." Understanding team needs and selecting the right tools leads to greater adoption and fewer risky employee workarounds.
Key Steps for Starting Your Plan
Getting started doesn't have to be complicated. Here are three practical steps you can take to move from a simple plan to long-term operational strength.
1. Make Someone Responsible
In a small business, everyone wears multiple hats, but your BCP needs a clear owner. This could be you, your office manager, or your most trusted employee. This person is responsible for making sure the plan is kept up-to-date.
2. Know Your Key Partners
Your business relies on others. Make a list of your critical partners—your internet provider, your key software vendors, your main supplier—and ask yourself what you would do if they had a problem. Having a backup option in mind is a simple but powerful step.
3. Review and Test It Simply
Your plan doesn't need a full-scale simulation. Just schedule a quick chat once a year with your team. Walk through a simple "what-if" scenario, like "What would we do if the internet was out for a whole day?" This simple exercise will uncover gaps and keep preparedness top of mind.
From Planning to Preparedness
Building business resilience is a journey, not a destination. By taking these practical steps, you can ensure your business is prepared not just to survive the next disruption, but to emerge from it stronger and more trusted by your customers.
This doesn't have to be a complex process. If you are ready to elevate your business continuity planning to a true resilience strategy, our expert teams in Digital Consultancy, Cloud Services and Cybersecurity can help you chart the course.
