How to build a BCDR plan, and Fitzrovia IT can help.

A Business Continuity Plan is a practical guide developed to ensure the continuity of critical IT operations during major disruptions—such as cyberattacks, data loss, power outages, or even extended remote work scenarios like those seen during a global lockdown.

IT business continuity planning involves assessing the impact of disrupted systems, applications, and data access, and determining recovery strategies that align with business priorities and technical dependencies. Business continuity plans should always be documented and tested through exercises for optimal effectiveness.

The goal of a business continuity plan is to strengthen the defence of businesses against various potential disruptions. It also aims to maintain critical business functions during unforeseen disasters. For IT, it's to maintain uptime and availability of critical IT systems and services during unexpected disruptions, minimising data loss and downtime.

Before you start building your BCP, it’s important to read and reread the essentials of a Business Continuity Plan:

• BCP Team: Amid a disaster or emergency, having a team or point person to go to will be essential. The BCP team will be responsible for planning and testing business continuity strategies. The BCP team should include IT leaders, cybersecurity specialists, and systems administrators responsible for managing backups, infrastructure, and failover operations.
• Business Impact Analysis (BIA): A BIA identifies, quantifies, and qualifies the impact of a loss, interruption, or disruption. Having a BIA will be essential in discovering risks that your business is exposed to and the potential disruptions that may occur.
• Risk Mitigation: This element pertains to the strategies against the risks that were discovered during the BIA. Risk mitigation in IT focuses on strengthening cybersecurity posture, implementing redundant systems, securing data backups, maintaining patch management, and ensuring infrastructure resilience.
• Business Continuity Strategies: A good BCP should establish strategies or alternate practices to keep the business running despite disruptions or disasters.
• Training: All relevant personnel associated with the business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident response process should be trained according to the BCP plan that’s established and agreed upon.
• Testing: In this phase, strategies and plans are rehearsed or exercised to demonstrate their effectiveness. Testing the plan before rolling it out will enable the BCP team to discover potential flaws and fix them before they lead to damage or injury. It’s recommended to review and test the plan periodically to ensure that all protocols and strategies are up-to-date.

So the steps of building a business continuity plan are as follows:

• Step 1: Determine the IT risk profile by assessing vulnerabilities in People (IT staff availability, skill gaps), Processes (IT service dependencies), Platforms (applications, infrastructure), and Providers.
• Step 2: Identify mission-critical IT systems, applications, and data services essential to business continuity.
• Step 3: Establish the business continuity plan objectives.
• Step 4: Evaluate the potential impact of disruptions to the business and its workers.
• Step 5: List actions to protect the business.
• Step 6: Organise contact lists.
• Step 7: Maintain, review, and continuously update the BCP.

How can Fitzrovia IT help?

Fitzrovia IT specialises in developing comprehensive Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategies tailored to your organisation's needs. We design and implement robust continuity plans and support them with services such as tabletop exercises, controlled drills, and full-scale simulations. These exercises rigorously test your IT infrastructure and operational readiness, ensuring your business can respond effectively to disruptions.

Our end-to-end BCDR solutions help safeguard your critical systems, minimise downtime, and keep your operations running smoothly under any circumstances.

Contact us to discuss setting your business up with a Business Continuity Plan.