The Four Phases of a Business Continuity Plan
Business Continuity is a complex arrangement of the critical processes that allow for continuation of business activities after an emergency.
Business Continuity planning can be divided into four stages. Each phase should be reflected in a site-specific BCP.
- Initial Response
- Relocation
- Recovery
- Restoration
There are numerous advantages of modeling BC/DR (business continuity/disaster recovery) plans as business processes with ARIS models and methodology:
- BCP increases preciseness of expression and consistency of BC/DR plan;
- It ensures legible and easily understandable way of documenting and communicating BC/DR plan
- Increases the efficiency of traditional verification techniques like desk-checks and walkthroughs;
- It makes BC/DR maintenance, on-demand adjustment and audit easier;
- Assessment of BC/DR plan can be performed prior to its execution by means of simulation or using analysis techniques and property definitions with the consultants. The analysis encompasses timing and dynamic behaviour, completeness and resource utilization properties;
- Monitoring and supervision of the execution of BC/DR plan is easier and more efficient when it is modeled as business process with appropriate diagrams;
- It ensures considerable money savings as only plans validated and verified on ARIS models could be exercised in reality;
- It might help to standardize BC/DR plans within a distributed organization.
- ARIS models of BC/DR plans are a common language to be used by all the stakeholders. As it’s level of formalism is considerably higher than in the case of a textual form it makes the communication between different stakeholders more precise and unambiguous.
Other related topics:
4 Phases of Business Continuity Plan
ARIS (Business Process Analysis)
ARCM (Governance, Risk and Compliance Management)
ARIS Aware
Business Process Management
