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The Essential Business Continuity Plan Template [DOC]
- Business continuity planning is critical for organizations to be prepared for cyberattacks, natural disasters, adverse events, and disruptions to ensure resilience. Organizations should have their own customized plan, which is not standardized across the board. However, adopting a structured business continuity plan template can help ensure that each client gets a comprehensive but accurate set of checklists and guidelines to implement business continuity effectively across departments. Small and medium-size businesses are especially vulnerable to catastrophes like ransomware attacks that paralyze all business operations because often, they lack resources and in-house skills to plan for their own business continuity. MSPs can help these businesses to build long-term business resilience.
- The business continuity plan template outlined in this article can serve as a good basis for MSPs/MSSPs to create a customized business continuity plan for clients. While business continuity and disaster recovery plans are used synonymously, they represent different organizational functions and should be integrated in overall disaster management strategies. The goals, objectives and scope of the business continuity plan should be defined in the template, along with sections related to description of critical assets, continuity activation criteria, communication channels, recovery objectives, recovery sequence, security and access issues, key documentation, and plan location and access.
- A disaster recovery plan focuses on restoring access to services and data and restoring lost or damaged business systems to full operational capacity after a catastrophic IT event. It's important to align the development of business continuity plans with the development of disaster recovery plans to have a holistic approach to timing and prioritizing continuity and recovery procedures. Business continuity planning helps organizations minimize downtime, safeguard employee well-being and data privacy, maintain customer trust and loyalty, respond quickly and effectively to threats, and comply with regulatory requirements.
- In a business continuity plan template, the continuity plan activation criteria should outline the worst operational disruption scenarios that may require activation and an impact analysis for each scenario to measure the impact on ongoing operations. Organizations should list all the roles essential for restoring and executing each critical service and primary and backup personnel. They should also include a section listing known recovery objectives for each service, a list of actions that must be completed to fully recover from adverse events and return to normal business operations, and plans of action to respond to risk assessments and comply with legal requirements. Cybersecurity providers can support SMB clients' long-term business resilience planning and develop a comprehensive business continuity plan alongside a proactive cyber attack protection strategy.
- In the event of a prolonged service disruption, organizations need to identify various communication channels to keep in touch with customers, service providers, and stakeholders to ensure that if there is a failure in one channel, a backup is available. The location of the document, dissemination of copies, and the processes for annual reviews and adjustments to the BCP should also be included. MSPs should look for a platform that will help them manage their clients' cybersecurity plans at scale, helping them evaluate and analyze their clients' disaster readiness, build detailed policies with actionable tasks, track and measure progress, and generate executive status reports with a single click.
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