In Strategy: It is a competitor key differentiation
To Operation: It is a governance mechanism
Within the Organization: It is a culture of change
For an Individual: It is a responsibility

Let’s start by simplifying the difference between Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR).  Business Continuity in its essence, objects to manage all strategic, corporate assets, vital facilities, supply chains, human resources and day-to-day business processes proactively to ensure that business functions are performed in either it is optimal or acceptable form.  At the other hand, Disaster Recovery’s main objective is to ensure that information technology procedures, responses and contingency plans are in place to resume business operations as usual and as soon as possible after an emergency, disaster or crisis. In fact, Disaster Recovery acts as an enabler for the whole business continuity plan and plays a vital role on it is practical execution.

One of the BC biggest challenges is when top management perceives it as a short term initiative that won’t maintain the interest within corporate employees. Hence, fail to be sustained effectively for long term. Therefore, training and awareness of its importance with basic understanding of it, frequent and on-ongoing induction programs for departments and branches, continual monitoring and improvement plan for the BC program, and orientation for new employees; all are considered as a focal tools to assure knowledge and awareness are spread among the organization. Another challenge is the miss perception of the BC committee being a team who works vertically on their own after they access organization’s library and documents! In fact, that is why most of the BC initiatives fail and end up being a dead horse; where management and company will not be delivered with the value and BC team will not be able to encapsulate the deliverables and scope.

BC program plays a role in corporate governance. At one hand, from business view, it measures the performance and availability of services and products offered to employees and customers, and defines the where, what, when, who, and how matrix of each. It assess the processes implemented, procedures followed, and by default it improves it as part of its controls. At the other hand, from an IT view, there are increasing costs linked with operating the business, mainly as it becomes more dependent on increasingly complex and expensive IT infrastructures. As an instance, the expense associated with storage area networks (SAN) or any other enterprise storage solution and the memory consumed by this system; an area for governance and potential cost management is the sizing, design and expenditures related to it. An effective BC program implicitly helps to identify the critical storage needs of an organization. IT departments often over resource and the BC program can be valued, helping to focus and reduce IT budgets.

BC programs are a culture of change; the entire organization should be involved and embed it in within its DNA. It is a responsibility of each individual, manager and departmental representative to actively participate in the planning process for their own business unit. This will achieve a further more than an effective BC plan; especially when the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is developed by evaluating and understanding all existing organization’s processes. This better understanding of an organization can lead to optimize, improve and streamline those processes and potentially reduce costs and deliver faster service.