Many organizations neglect disaster scenarios and fail to prepare for them in the battle against malicious threats. But we've all heard the CrowdStrike story and learned the risks of failing to take action. Cybersecurity regulations and the growing risks associated with the rise in sophisticated cybercrime have driven businesses to establish cybersecurity policies and employ the services of managed security service providers (MSSPs) to address the threats.
Dubbed one of the largest (and most expensive) IT outages to date, the CrowdStrike incident made it clearer than ever before that businesses and organizations must plan and prepare for disasters that can impact (or fully disable) operations---a process called business continuity planning.
What is a business continuity plan template?
Business continuity is the ability of an organization to minimize disruption to operations while rapidly adapting to unforeseen circumstances, such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, critical third-party service provider failures, accidents, and other adverse events.
Organizations' IT leaders and continuity specialists use a business continuity plan (BCP) to prepare for emergencies. Compliance with local governmental and industry standards (such as ISO 22301) is often required.
Since every business is faced with different threats to business continuity, each needs its own custom-tailored business continuity plan that considers the organization's unique operational requirements. However, adopting a structured business continuity plan template can help ensure that each of your clients gets a comprehensive but accurate set of checklists and guidelines to implement business continuity effectively across departments.
Business Continuity Plan (BCP) vs. Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
While business continuity and disaster recovery are frequently used synonymously, the two represent different organizational functions and integrate differently into your client's overall business disaster management strategies.
A business continuity plan is kind of like a lifeboat---its goal is to ensure that business operations continue through and during a crisis, minimizing the impact of a catastrophic event when the "boat" starts to sink.
Disaster recovery plans (DRPs) focus on a disaster's aftermath. These plans are designed to reestablish access to services and data and restore lost or damaged business systems to full operational capacity after a catastrophic IT event, such as a risk to cyber systems or a power outage at your clients' headquarters.
In developing a business continuity plan, it's important to align it with the development of DRPs to have a holistic approach to timing and prioritizing continuity and recovery procedures.
Why a Business Continuity Plan Template is Absolutely Essential
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Continuity of business operations during (and after) a crisis or disaster is critical to building business resilience. To contribute to your clients' resilience, you must provide them with a business continuity plan template that helps them build it.
In addition to empowering business resilience strategies, business continuity planning helps:
- Minimize downtime to protect revenues due to diminished operational capacity.
- Safeguard employee wellbeing, data privacy, and job security.
- Maintain customer trust and loyalty by ensuring the business can still provide services during a crisis.
- Respond quickly and effectively to threats to business operations.
- Comply with regulatory requirements, especially common in industries like utilities, infrastructure, and emergency services, as well as the service providers in their supply chains.
For MSPs/MSSPs, business continuity plan templates are essential in producing client-facing business continuity plans. They help ensure the plans you deliver to your clients are comprehensive, relevant, actionable, and easy to customize to each organization's specific business continuity requirements.
The Essential Business Continuity Plan Template
As we noted previously, no two business continuity plans are the same, so it's essential to consider and clearly define the goals, objectives, and scope of the business continuity plan in your template. You may also want to add sections, such as those related to temporary evacuation protocols or loss of physical business operations sites. Some sections are mandatory for any business continuity plan, so let's explore them.
1. Description and Priority of Critical Assets and Services
In this section, provide a table that your client's business continuity managers can fill with a comprehensive list of all business-critical services they provide to customers and a list of high-risk and business-critical assets and services required for prompt and accurate processing of customer data.
In the tables you design for your client's business continuity plans, you can include a column to set a numeric priority value for each business-critical service and asset and their customer-facing services. You may need to add columns related to the ownership of the service reliability and accessibility of each customer-facing service, as well as alternatives for mission-critical services when they fail.
2. Continuity Plan Activation Criteria
This section is designed for your clients to outline their worst operational disruption nightmares. In other words, the conditions under which your client's business continuity plan is executed. To help your clients describe the unexpected (but expected) disaster, include conditions like expected outage duration, level of severity of the disaster event, and an impact analysis for each scenario to measure the impact on the organization's ongoing operations.
3. Communication Channels & Alternatives
In the event of a prolonged service disruption, the organization will identify what means will permit communication with clients, employees, partners, and other relevant stakeholders. In this section, it's important to list numerous communication channels to keep in touch with customers, service providers, and stakeholders to ensure that failure in one channel does not mean your customer's teams are left in the dark.
4. Key Contacts, Essential Roles & Alternates
Your clients will need to list all the roles essential for restoring and executing each critical service and primary and backup/alternate personnel.
You will need to include a table listing the key contact information essential to each service (and this plan) and potential replacements in case they are not available. Be sure to include the service owner and internal and external technical support that may be necessary to maintain business continuity and recover from the adverse event.
5. Recovery Objectives
Next, your business continuity plan template should include a section listing known recovery objectives for each service. In other words, this part outlines the conditions under which business continuity and restoration have been completed. These may include regulatory requirements and business obligations, such as service-level agreement information.
6. Recovery Sequence for the Service
Perhaps one of the most important sections of any business continuity plan is the list of actions that must be completed to fully recover from adverse events and return to normal business operations. Instruct your customers to list step-by-step instructions for recovering mission-critical services, maintaining operations while the crisis is being managed, and resuming normal operations.
7. Plans of Action
Organizations can, should, and are often legally obligated to run regular risk assessments and follow a comprehensive vulnerability management strategy. In this section, your clients will need to list all the potential conditions identified through these assessments and detail the response actions to each adverse event. For example, this section might include evacuation plans in case of a fire at the HQ and available mitigation measures such as fire extinguishers and sprinklers.
8. Requirements for Compliance with Laws, Regulations, and Rules
In many cases, you will need to include a separate section for your clients to identify and list legal requirements that must be considered when performing continuity planning. For example, some industry-specific regulations require that businesses take certain measures to ensure service availability or encrypt data backups according to certain encryption standards.
9. Security or Access Issues
Describe any known security or access issues important to accessing the alternate sites, or security considerations in case of plan activation outside of normal operating hours. Consider both physical and logical access. For example, your clients may need to include essential employees' home IP addresses in the RMM trusted IP list when a disaster requires the activation of work-from-home (WFH) policies.
10. Key Documentation
Your clients have the option to link to technical manuals, reference guides, and other supporting materials that may be necessary to restore service operations. Since this business continuity plan will be exposed to employees, partners, and third-party service providers, be sure to proof all documents and files for private information like passwords, API tokens, and encryption keys.
11. Plan Location, Access, Maintenance, Approval and Execution Authority
Last but not least, this section covers the approval, execution, and maintenance of the business continuity plan you've generated for your client. Here, your client must list the executives responsible for approving the plan and conducting the required annual review process, as well as the location of the document, dissemination of copies, and the processes for annual reviews and adjustments to the BCP.
How MSPs/MSSPs Support Business Continuity Plans
Small and medium organizations are especially vulnerable to catastrophes like the Crowdstrike outage or a ransomware attack that paralyzes all business operations and damages digital security. Since SMBs often lack the resources and in-house skills to develop their own BCPs, they rely on MSPs and MSSPs to support them in their business continuity planning and, if a crisis comes, its execution.
For MSPs/MSSPs, this is an opportunity to help their SMB clients with long-term business resilience planning and develop a comprehensive BCP alongside a proactive protection strategy against cyber attacks.
Business Continuity Planning at Scale with Cynomi
The business continuity plan template outlined in this article can serve your needs if you run an MSP/MSSP operation serving relatively small organizations. This can be a good basis for a customized business continuity plan per client. Suppose you're looking to provide cybersecurity management services to multiple clients who may require multiple BCPs for business units and departments. In that case, you need a platform that will help you manage your clients' cybersecurity at scale.
With Cynomi, you will be provided with a customized business continuity policy per client with a click of a button. Cynomi provides you with a step-by-step plan so you can create a BCP per client more easily. It also supports the implementation and tracking of the BCP for your clients' specific needs. Cynomi enables you to evaluate and analyze your clients' disaster readiness, build detailed policies with actionable tasks, track and measure progress, and generate executive status reports with a single click.
Request a demo to get started.
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