A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is an essential component of any business. Customers, investors and stakeholders require evidence that business disruptions have been planned for and the company can continue to operate during a minor outage through to a catastrophic disaster. Spring Lake Consulting can help your business create a plan that is right-sized depending on the infrastructure and operational functions that you maintain in-house.

Our team will work with your staff to ensure that critical systems are accounted for and business processes can be replicated at an alternate site. Too frequently, BCP plans focus on the technology that needs to be replicated. However, there are many critical business processes, which are people driven, that get lost in the planning for a disaster. Our professionals work closely with clients to enable business system and process recoverability and craft appropriate policies for your company.

During the course of the BCP creation our consultants will:

• Create the business impact analyses to determine a criticality hierarchy of systems, business processes and staff
• Establish the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for mission critical applications
• Assist in the selection of a DR site
• Scope and size your plan to be consistent with your company's in-house operations and processing
• Develop any replication or redundancy procedures to achieve full recovery capability
• Review service agreements to ensure the company needs are met during a disaster
• Conduct your testing scenarios to ensure an adequate degree of planning
• Maintain your plan so that as your business evolves new requirements are accounted for and policies and procedures are updated.

Many people tend to think of the BCP as a solution for a 9/11 type of disaster. It is important to remember that the disruption may be caused by a much more typical event like a failed piece of hardware, a power outage or a flood. The BCP needs to be the all encompassing plan that handles all types of outages from small to large.

The BCP can also be an excellent marketing tool. Potential customers or investors looking to do business with your company will ask what steps you've taken to continue operating your business in the event of a disaster. Having a thorough and well designed plan to show them immediately, rather than making excuses as to why you've put off disaster planning, will demonstrate your serious commitment to the business as well as your concern for the stakeholders of the company.