What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan is designed to ensure the continuity of business operations during unexpected or catastrophic incidents. It outlines procedures, processes, and resources that can be mobilized to respond to an event in order to minimize disruption and restore normal business operations as quickly as possible. The plan also serves to help protect personnel, customers, and any other stakeholders in the event of an emergency.
What's included in this Business Continuity Plan template?
- 3 focus areas
- 6 objectives
- 6 projects
- 6 KPIs
Each focus area has its own objectives, projects, and KPIs to ensure that the strategy is comprehensive and effective.
Who is the Business Continuity Plan template for?
This Business Continuity Plan template is designed to help teams of any size and industry to create a plan to maintain operations during unexpected incidents. This template will guide you through the necessary steps to create an effective Business Continuity Plan while keeping your team organized and focused on the objectives.
1. Define clear examples of your focus areas
A focus area is a broad topic or subject that your team is focusing on. This can be anything from customer service to data protection. When defining your focus areas, it is important to think about the objectives, projects, and KPIs that could fall under each area. Examples of focus areas could include remote access, data protection, and more.
2. Think about the objectives that could fall under that focus area
Objectives are the goals that you set when defining your focus areas. They should be broad statements that define the desired outcome of your team's efforts. Examples of objectives could include minimizing operational disruption, maximizing operational resilience, enhancing remote access security, and improving remote access availability.
3. Set measurable targets (KPIs) to tackle the objective
When creating objectives, it is important to set measurable targets or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Examples of KPIs could include reducing downtime from 4 hours to 2 hours, increasing user authentication from 1 factor to 2 factors, reducing response time to incident resolution from 8 hours to 4 hours, and increasing data encryption from 40% to 70%.
4. Implement related projects to achieve the KPIs
Projects are the initiatives that your team will need to implement to reach its objectives. Projects should be specific and actionable with assigned actions and deadlines. Examples of projects could include establishing a business continuity plan, developing backup response protocols, implementing multi-factor authentication, and updating remote access protocols.
5. Utilize Cascade Strategy Execution Platform to see faster results from your strategy
Cascade is a strategy execution platform that helps teams to create, share, and track objectives, projects, and KPIs. With Cascade, teams can quickly build out objectives and projects, and track progress in real-time. Cascade makes it easy to keep teams organized, focused, and on track to achieve their goals faster and more efficiently.