Business Continuity Planning Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Business Continuity Planning - Research Paper Example In 2007, Hewlett Packard conducted a study on the uptake of business continuity planning in some selected organizations. The results indicated that about â€Å"31% of small business† had no business continuity planning in place (Guy & Lownes-Jackson, 2011, p.55). This paper will explore how business can develop a business continuity plan to certify that they are prepared to face disruptive events that natural or manmade factors can trigger within the business environment. In this research paper, I will explore the steps that business can take to develop an efficient business continuity planning that will boost the preparedness to face disaster. In particular, the paper will delve on the steps that organizations must follow to arrive at a concrete and useful business continuity planning. First, the paper will explore first step called the initiation step where senior management of an organization meets and carry out a comprehensive review of the shortcomings in preparedness alo ng with evaluating available resources. Second, the paper will address the second stage—business impact analysis. The paper will reveal the value of business impact analysis and its execution. ... Lastly, the fifth section of the paper will detail how organizations carry out maintenance and testing of business continuity planning they have developed. Such a paper should provide significant insights on the process of business continuity planning and embed it as a core strategy that businesses can adopt to remain competitive in a world for myriads of factors can cause business to stop their operations. Business continuity planning Business operations are often at risk of disruption by threats from natural forces or human factors. For instance, terrorists attack on World Trade Centre and the Tsunami in Japan left many businesses with the lack of capacity to do any business operations (Adkins, Thornton & Blake, 2009). It is such threats that create a need for business continuity planning because this process allows business to resume their operations and sustain critical operations when an outage occurs (Wei. 2009). In order for an organization to have a business continuity plan i n place, it has to follow the five steps necessary in creating a Business continuity plan. a) Initiation the Plan This is often the first state of business continuity planning where the senior management of the organization meet, strategize, and evaluate the feasibility of the project. This meeting plays an integral role in allowing the managers to own the business continuity-planning project and dedicate various resources for its completion. In this meeting, the management will review the goals and objective of the project and align them with the business objectives of the organization (Rinehardt, 2010). In addition, the management must also identity