Business Continuity Planning Services

Natural and man-made disasters are becoming more and more common, prompting organizations across all industries to enact their emergency response and recovery practices. Time is money and when your systems are offline, that downtime could be costing you significant money in lost revenue and lost employee productivity. The difference between those who are successful and those who fall victim to these disasters is having a formalized, documented Business Continuity Planning Program in place that outlines the critical business functions and allocates specific responsibilities to the key stakeholders in the organization.

The Compass Approach 

Compass' Business Continuity Planning Services use a phased approach to help your organization develop a methodical, systematical program, based on your organization's specific needs, to recover faster and comply with regulatory requirements.

Phase 1 - Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

The objective of the BIA is to develop a comprehensive report of all of the departments, systems, and applications within an organization that need to be a part of the Business Continuity Plan. From there, Compass works closely with key stakeholders within the organization to outline the Key Business Processes (KBP), document these process, and identify the process owners. Compass will then help to determine the importance of these departments and systems to the operation of the business, the impact of losing data due to downtime, and the impact of time to recover. Once the business impact is understood, critical systems will be ranked by tier of importance to the business taking into account the Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).

Phase 2 - Business Continuity Plan Development

Based on the results from the BIA in phase 1, Compass will begin the process of developing the Business Continuity Plan. During this phase, Compass will perform a Risk Assessment to identify weaknesses in the current plan and develop a remediation strategy to strengthen the updated plan. 

Phase 3 - Business Continuity Plan Training

The next phase in the Business Continuity Planning Program service is to train your staff on the Business Continuity Plan. The goal of this phase in the process is to ensure that your employees know and understand their roles and responsibilities should the plan need to be enacted. This allows for consistency and communication around who is supposed to do what when the time comes with the goal of reducing any downtime.

Phase 4 - Business Continuity Plan Testing

Testing your Business Continuity Plan is an often overlooked but critical step in your overall Business Continuity Plan Program. Testing of the plan allows for the simulation of an event to determine how well your plan works when it is needed. Testing the plan also allows you to make the necessary adjustments, a lessons learned exercise, to further strengthen your plan and program.