Business Continuity is a critical feature of any business, more so in this time and age. Business Continuity ensures that business operations can resume as quickly as possible in the event of any disruption resulting from a disaster.
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a framework that allows an organisation to identify potential threats, and the impact these threats have on the business operations, thereby designing, implementing and testing cost-effective and robust mechanisms and responses to ensure that the business impact of any threat is minimised and business operations can be restored as quickly as possible.
IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM) is a critical part of Business Continuity which consists of various elements that make any business work. (Figure 1)
So what is a disaster? A disaster is any unplanned event that results in the business to be disrupted and render it unable to continue normal operations in whole or in part. Typically disasters can be categorised as,
Natural disasters (earthquake, tsunamis, hurricanes, pandemic like Covid-19 etc)
Willful/human damage (terrorism, cyber attack, security hack, foul play, civil unrest etc)
Accidental damage (unplanned situations like power failure, fire, explosion, telecommunications failure etc)
A disaster is not any long-term risk due to a change in business direction or re-organisational.
What constitutes a disaster varies from organisation to organisation. Regardless, it must be defined from the perspective of the business based primarily on the depth and breadth of the impact on the business. The definition of disaster helps to define the scope of BCM.
Given every organisation is not immune to the risk of a disaster, it is critical that organisations establish a robust framework to continue the minimum level of business operations in the event of a disaster.
