Business Resilience/Continuity
Business resilience is defined as the ability shown by a business organization to act quickly to adapt to a disruption or disaster that may affect the business negatively. This ability to fight any disaster is shown while business continues to maintain its operations instead of dissolving. Therefore, business resilience safeguards the assets, workers as well as the brand equity. Furthermore, business resilience offers post-disaster methods that mitigate the downtime that can prove costly to business. Through business resilience, business vulnerabilities are shown up thus maintaining the daily business activities against the unforeseen breaches (Cerullo and Michael 71).
Business resilience starts by understanding the business workflows which is preserved so that the business organization can survive unforeseen events. The human element is considered as the continuously overlooked problem of the businesses resilience planning strategies in the sense that when people are in a situation characterized by chaos, he or she must be prepared and skilled on how to respond to the disaster accordingly. In most instances, business resilience is also known as business continuity.
Business resilience encompasses three key elements that enhances business continuity namely; resilience, recovery, and contingency. First, resilience explains how the critical business organization activities and appropriate infrastructure should be put in place such that they are not affected by the widespread disruptions, for instance, the utilization of spare capacity and redundancy. Secondly, the recovery process explains how the arrangements should be made to recover any business activity that might fail due to some disruptions. Lastly, contingency explains how the business comes up with a generalized capacity and ability to cope with the disasters and major incidents including the incidents and disasters that were not present before and those that were unpredicted (Cerullo and Michael 72).
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
Business continuity plan is needed when there is a disruption in the business organization. Such disruptions include disasters issues such as equipment failure, fire, and natural disasters for instance flood, earthquakes, social unrest, hacking or any other internet attack, power failure, application failure or database corruption, human error or strike, malicious software such as virus and worms attack (Wallace, Michael, and Lawrence 105).
Mainly, the disaster recovery and business continuity planning topic addresses the issues business organization always face whenever human-made or natural threats acts to hinder the continuation of the business. In light of this, it focuses on the responsibility to keep the most important business services running and how to respond quickly on recovering in the process of protecting the welfare of the workers.
More so, issues such as budget estimates, time schedules and resources should be addressed for the business continuity plan to succeed. Ultimately, business continuity planning is the most important task and should be considered as a corrective control for the business organization (Wallace, Michael, and Lawrence 105). Thus, the course should not only discuss business continuity planning topic as a preventive control element but also as a detective and corrective control. First, as a preventive control, it should include controls that are associated with important assets and prevent wastage. Secondly, detective controls include those that alert the business organization quickly when the problem occurs. Lastly, corrective control indicates the restoration of business to normal operation without any delay.
Similarly, while discussing the business continuity planning, the course should approach the element of business impact under three important questions. Business impact analysis measures the impact of each disaster to the important business functions. The course needs to focus on the possible business disasters, explain how to assess the risk of the prevailing disasters, evaluate the impacts and determine the loss caused by these risks. Therefore, this course should explain business impact analysis and is therefore tasked with addressing the following three questions (Webb et al. 88).
What is the most critical process? While addressing this question, the course should discuss the prioritization procedure used identify the most critical processes of the business.
What resources are required by the business? Every business needs resources, and therefore this question must be discussed.
How long can the business endure the outage? The course should teach how time is determined by outlining the process of performing the downtime estimation
Furthermore, the course is tasked to address the following questions to students;
What is business continuity planning? The course should focus on explaining the plans, arrangements, and measures to ensure the continuous delivery of critical processes. The course should include the description of the resources like labor force and assets
What is the importance of business continuity planning? The course should address the issues of risk from prevailing disasters like accidents, sabotage, power failure, communication failure, pollution, cyber-attack among other issues.
How to create business continuity plan? The course should discuss the five sections which are BCP Governance, Business Impact Analysis, plans, Readiness procedures and finally the Quality assurance techniques.
What should the business do when a disruption happens? The course should discuss the three steps. These steps are; response, continuation critical process, and recovery.
Conclusion
When the business is not in a position to run its critical process smoothly, the effects can be severe. Businesses face risks and therefore face potential disaster if not prepared thoroughly. Therefore, this course should be taken very seriously to create future business workers, managers, and administrators who can run the business in future. Further, business units are of importance in the growth of our economy thus this learning course should be extensive.
Works Cited
Cerullo, M V, and Michael J. Cerullo. Business Continuity Planning: A Comprehensive Approach. Emmitsburg, MD: National Emergency Training Center, 2004. Print.
Wallace, Michael, and Lawrence Webber. The Disaster Recovery: A Step-by-Step Plan to Ensure Business Continuity and Protect Vital Operations, Facilities and Assets. New York: Amacom, 2004. Internet resource.
Webb, Gary R, Kathleen J. Tierney, and James M. Dahlhamer. "Businesses and Disasters: Empirical Patterns and Unanswered Questions." Natural Hazards Review. 1.2 (2000): 83-90. Print.
