Business Continuity For Dummies

Working Out Your BC Strategy Responses

You need to consider three stages of an incident when looking at your continuity strategy responses. In the following list, we describe these stages and include some examples from an imagined scenario in which a business loses power and the RTO is estimated to be six hours:

1. Emergency response and incident management stage: The strategies that form your immediate actions in an emergency, such as implementing your communications plan.

In the example, this stage may involve calling for a generator that can provide power for 24 hours.

2. Continuity stage: The strategies to ensure you can continue to deliver your critical activities and in turn deliver your key products and services during a disruption.

In the example, this stage may consist of moving operations to another site that has power within 24 hours.

3. Recovery and resumption stage: The strategies to recover critical activities to a sustainable level leading to resumption of operations to what your business describes as normal.

In the example, this stage would cover the actions involved in transferring back to the original premises.

These stages may require different strategies to ensure that you maintain all your critical activities, and so consider this aspect on a case-by-case basis.

Figure 7-1 depicts a simple six-phase process for identifying strategies in response to the ...