Speaker 1: In this video, I want to answer the question, what is a business continuity plan? A business continuity plan is a plan for how an organization can continue to deliver its services through a major disruption. The business continuity planning process involves determining a range of threat scenarios and then creating a plan and documentation for how to maintain business continuity through those incidents. Often business continuity means retrenching back to core services and letting less important activities go until we can fully recover the situation. The plan for recovering from a major incident and returning to normal operations is usually referred to as a disaster recovery plan. There are six steps to developing a business continuity plan. Step one is a business impact analysis to identify the critical business operations and processes and the resources that support them. Second, we identify the principal classes of threat and the impacts that they may have on our organization. We often collate these into a small number of archetypal scenarios to assist us with later training and testing of our business continuity plan. Then the third step, we take action to mitigate those risks. Now this is not strictly part of business continuity planning, but I would consider it wise to carry it out at this stage of the business continuity planning process. Step four is to create readiness plans to maintain continuity in the face of the threats that we've identified. Typically these are threats to people, to physical infrastructure, and to technology and data. Step five is to identify a core team of leaders that will be the business continuity team. We need to conduct training to make tests and exercises that will allow us to evaluate our plans and to increase preparedness. And finally, step six is to maintain the plan and to keep it under review as part of a continuous BCP, business continuity planning cycle. Now here's a vital piece of advice that I learned from a business continuity planning expert many years ago. It's no good having a plan that exists only as a set of documents stored in your offices. It has to be in the heads of that business continuity planning, business continuity leadership team. Because what happens if the threat, the incident, denies access to the office? What are you going to do then if all of your plans are in a document in the chief executive's office? You're lost. And if all the plans are stored in servers and those are lost, then that's no better either. So the core of the plan has to become ingrained in the thinking of the leadership team so that they are able to fall back and recover services quickly and effectively without necessarily having access to all the steps in the plan that's been articulated. And as always, the value of planning is not the plan itself. It's the mindset that it creates. So business continuity plan is a plan to manage the continued operation of your business or the core elements of your business during a major incident. If this video has been valuable, please do give us a like. And if you want more, please subscribe. And if you want to hear about our videos as they appear, please hit the notification bell.