What Does a Business Continuity Program Look Like?
by Kirk Drake
If you believe that business continuity planning is living & breathing processes than this blog is for you. If you believe it is something that you do because the regulators make you than don’t bother reading on…
A Business Continuity Program for credit union follows the following outline:
Business Impact Analysis – core to planning for DR/BCP for an organization. The BIA identifies potential threats, risks, impacts, and outlines criticality of business processes. The outcome of your BIA helps determine needs/requirements to sustain the business. Ongoing Operations uses the BIA as the foundation of your program. Each department outlines their processes and ranks them based on technologies and whether there are manual workarounds, member impact and confidence and recovery needs. Based on the outcome of this analysis, departments are able to focus on those areas in which documentation, cross training and additional planning are needed. Single Points of Failure can be identified and plans for resolution created. Data for the BIA is collected in a workshop with team leaders from the department that does this business process providing the raw data required to build your draft analysis:
o Can the process be performed manually?
o Timeframe for severe impact to the credit union?
o At what point will the member be impacted by the disruption?
o At what point will the member begin to lose confidence in the credit union?
o At what point with the credit union be at risk for increased fraud or financial loss?
o Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – the period of time within which systems, applications or functions must be recovered after an outage.
o Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – the maximum amount of data loss an organization can sustain during an event (0 hours means that only the transaction in progress at time of the disaster could be lost)
o Supporting Resources such as policy, procedure, and who you contact for help
o IT systems and connectivity required to support the process.