Risk Management

Week 6 Lab 2

Business Continuity Plan

All businesses are at peak performance when things run smoothly, but it’s a well-planned business that can still perform after a serious disruption. Every business experiences outages or disruptions at some level. Minor disruptions are so commonplace, in fact, that they’re “just a part of doing business.”

Examples of minor disruptions range from employee turnover to a supplier changing its prices to a busted microwave in the office kitchen. More significant disruptions include losing valuable executives, experiencing serious market volatility, or facing a massive water leak in the office or warehouse. Finally, the worst-case disasters that can completely halt business include a major fire or a flu pandemic.

Business continuity describes the set of processes an organization must act on when disruptions occur. For the worst-case scenarios, business continuity is labeled disaster recovery, but business continuity generally means continuing business for any disruption significant enough to benefit from planning. No type of planning is more important to an organization than business continuity and disaster recovery planning. The purpose of a business continuity plan (BCP) is to identify and assess the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities that threaten a company so you can minimize both internal and external exposure to them and so you can mitigate them. A BCP’s goal is to document processes for prevention and recovery.

In this lab, you will explain a BCP’s goals, you will align a business impact analysis (BIA) with the BCP’s scope, you will identify the BCP’s major parts, and you will develop a BCP outline for a given scenario.

Learning Objectives

Upon completing this lab, you will be able to:

Define the goals and purpose of a business continuity plan (BCP) for an IT infrastructure. Align a business impact analysis (BIA) to define the scope of a business continuity plan

(BCP) for an IT infrastructure. Identify the major parts of a business continuity plan (BCP) unique to the scenario and IT

infrastructure. Develop a business continuity plan (BCP) outline for a given scenario and vertical industry.

Complete Lab #8, found on pages 63-68 of your Lab Manual.

Deliverables

Upon completion of this lab, you are required to provide the following deliverables to your instructor:

1.  Lab Report file;

2.  Lab Assessments file.