• BC planning must follow a disciplined approach like any other planning process. Organizations today dedicate specialized resources to develop and maintain BC plans. From the conceptualization to the realization of the BC plan, a lifecycle of activities can be defined for the BC process. The BC planning lifecycle includes five stages (see Figure):

1. Establishing objectives

2. Analyzing

3. Designing and developing

4. Implementing

5. Training, testing, assessing, and maintaining

   

   Figure: BC planning lifecycle

Several activities are performed at each stage of the BC planning lifecycle, including the following key activities:

1.Establishing objectives

• Determine BC requirements.

• Estimate the scope and budget to achieve requirements

• Select a BC team by considering subject matter experts from all areas of the business, whether internal or external.

• Create BC policies.

2.Analyzing

• Collect information on data profiles, business processes, infra-structure support, dependencies, and frequency of using business infrastructure.

• Identify critical business needs and assign recovery priorities.

• Create a risk analysis for critical areas and mitigation strategies.

• Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA).

• Create a cost and benefit analysis based on the consequences of data unavailability. Evaluate options.

3.Designing and developing

• Define the team structure and assign individual roles and responsibilities. For example, different teams are formed for activities such as emergency response, damage assessment, and infrastructure and application recovery.

• Design data protection strategies and develop infrastructure.

• Develop contingency scenarios.

• Develop emergency response procedures.

• Detail recovery and restart procedures.

4.Implementing

• Implement risk management and mitigation procedures that include backup, replication, and management of resources.

• Prepare the disaster recovery sites that can be utilized if a disaster affects the primary data center.

• Implement redundancy for every resource in a data center to avoid single points of failure.

5.Training, testing, assessing, and maintaining

• Train the employees who are responsible for backup and replication of business-critical data on a regular basis or whenever there is a modification in the BC plan.

• Train employees on emergency response procedures when disasters are declared.

• Train the recovery team on recovery procedures based on contingency scenarios.

• Perform damage assessment processes and review recovery plans.

• Test the BC plan regularly to evaluate its performance and identify its limitations.

• Assess the performance reports and identify limitations.

• Update the BC plans and recovery/restart procedures to reflect regular changes within the data center.