Business continuity refers to an organization's ability to maintain essential functions during and after an occurrence of a disaster. It is one of the most critical components of an organization. Essentially, the primary objective of business continuity is to keep fundamental organizational functions interrupted even during a crisis. It takes into account a variety of unpredictable events, including fire outbreaks, floods, diseases, cyberattacks, tornados, and other external threats and how their occurrence may affect the business. With the modern business environment characterized a diverse range of unpredictable adverse events, the concept of business continuity is vital to all types of organizations. However, it is only practical for a few. An elaborate continuity plan serves as a recipe for survivability of a business.
The value of business continuity lies in its ability to provide procedures and instructions in the face of a disaster. The purpose of business continuity is to maintain business operations or ensure quick recovery in the event of significant disruption (Epstein & Khan, 2014). Whether operating a large corporation or a small business, the strive to remain competitive is paramount (Epstein & Khan, 2014). The competitiveness of a business is measured by its capability to recover from an adverse event. Today, a significant number of organizations incorporate information technology (IT) solutions for recovery solutions. Such companies rely on IT capabilities to automatically implement such solutions. However, a company also depends on people and processes. A business continuity plan can help a business handle any situation effectively to maintain its image, market value, and enhance customer confidence.
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Business continuity offers a company an opportunity to evaluate itself. Kato and Charoenrat (2018) suggest that business continuity management forces an organization to assess itself in terms of potential areas of strengths and weaknesses. During a continuity planning process, an organization assesses its ability to prepare for and prevent implications of adverse events or recover from situations it is unable to prevent. Therefore, undertaking business continuity helps improve all aspects of an organization, including technology, communication, as well as resilience. Even more, interestingly, the development of a business continuity plan is necessary compliance or legal requirement for specific organizations, especially in the government sector.
A quality business continuity management (BCM) plan includes significant components. The first component is a risk assessment. It serves as the first stage towards a positive planning procedure which ensures that a business has an exhaustive understanding of what is serious to a business. Aleksandrova et al. (2018) advise that every organization to perform a threat and risk assessment and a business impact analysis (BIA) to determine a company's vulnerabilities, how, and to what degree they may disrupt operations. Aleksandrova et al. (2018) point out that every business has its risks depending on factors such as industry, nature of the company, geographical setting, size, and others. Also, the impact of an occurrence of a disaster may vary between organizations.
The second element of comprehensive business continuity is risk mitigation. Having conducted a risk assessment using BIA and similar tools, the identified risks should be alleviated. According to Alharthi and Khalifa (2019), the purpose of risk mitigation component is to eliminate possible vulnerabilities and loopholes risking the safety of a company's assets, resources, and processes. In other words, anything that threatens the health and safety of human resources, assets, operations, and environment should be minimized to an acceptable level. Various strategies can be employed at this stage, including building construction, strengthening security and protection systems, cross-personnel training, maintaining and testing programs, or notify recovery team (Alharthi & Khalifa, 2019). The steps above are not specific to one disaster; however, they offer a 360-degree approach to preparation for uncertainties.
Third, establishing business continuity strategies is an essential phase in the BCM planning process. It essentially summarizes the preventive, crises response, and recovery measures an organization should perform in the event of an occurrence of a disaster (Supriadi & Pheng, 2018). The approaches an organization takes at this stage will determine whether or not it will recover from a significant incident. As Supriadi and Pheng (2018) suggest, continuity strategies are a product of previous phases – risk assessment and risk mitigation. Some of the examples to take at this stage include alternate business practices, outsourcing, prioritizing customer needs. For instance, work-from-home solutions are a perfect example of business continuity strategies during this COVID-19 pandemic.
Forth component involves establishing roles and responsibilities. A BCM plan should be developed around a well-established team of competent and experienced individuals. Large organizations usually have well-defined teams with clear roles and responsibilities. On the other hand, small enterprises lack the sufficient size of the workforce to set aside the BCM team. Therefore, disaster management and recovery manager must involve every member of an organization by informing them about their roles and responsibilities in case an emergency occurs. BCM continuity roles and responsibilities should be built around disaster response strategies with BCM team or personnel in mind.
The last component involves testing and implementation. Zeng and Zio's (2017) research insist that the professional team involved in business continuity should undergo thorough training and simulation exercises. For instance, an organization facing a high risk of fire outbreaks should regularly conduct fire drills to prepare the team for possible danger. Zeng and Zio (2017) further say that the training should focus on preparing employees or team members for their roles and responsibilities as outlined in the BCM plan. Testing assesses the extent to which they can carry out their roles in the event of a major disaster. Testing also offers an in-depth overview of the reliability and resilience of business systems and procedures.
Risks involved in running an IT firm are plenty and may include Trojan attacks, buffer overflow attacks, session locking, virus, IP spoofing and denial of service attacks. The listed are adverse cyberattack threats that can seriously disrupt operations. Denial-of-service (DoS) attack is aimed at shutting down a network or machine to make it inaccessible for intended users (Easttom II, 2013). DoS attackers accomplish this kind of cyberattack by sending information that triggers a crash or flooding target with traffic. DoS attacks are conducted for a variety of reasons including extortion, anti-competitive business practice, turf wars, and punishment for undesired actions. DoS attacks affect numerous organizations connected to the internet, and even though measures can be implemented to mitigate their effects, it is nearly impossible and costly to handle.
Buffer overflow is a rare irregularity that happens when the software is writing data surpluses the buffer's capacity leading to nearby memory sites being overwritten. In simpler terms, it involves excessive information being passed into a container for which there is not sufficient space resulting in information replacing adjacent containers (Easttom II, 2013). Attackers can exploit buffer overflows to modify a computer's memory to regulate program performance. IP spoofing is a type of cyberattack where an individual uses a device or system to trick other computer networks by camouflaged as a valid entity. IP spoofers accomplish this by creating IP packets with fabricated source IP addresses to imitate other computer networks.
Viruses and trojans are other common types of cyberattacks. A virus is a malware that relies on host file to spread. On the other hand, a trojan is a program that deceives a user into appearing as something legitimate (Easttom II, 2013). Both viruses and trojans are used for malicious intents by attackers. The purposes of this kind of attack are to infect vulnerable systems, gain control, and steal sensitive data. Cyber attackers create and execute virus and trojans to prey on users by tricking them. Session locking occurs when a cyber attacker hijacks a session and temporarily locks out the user. Session locking can be used for a variety of reasons, including assuming control of a computer system or a device or stealing data.
Business continuity is fundamental in running a business of any type or size. A majority of companies, especially SMEs, undermine the value of BCM. Because of that, they fall victim to various unpredictable adverse incidents. The ongoing global social and economic crisis (COVID-19) pandemic is an excellent example of a significant event. Companies that lacked comprehensive business continuity plans have seriously been impacted. Most of them have experienced total business closure because they had not anticipated and prepared for an event such as this. Globalization and technology are seeing many companies adopt innovative internet-based solutions to their operations. The increased adoption of technological capabilities has also seen a significant rise in cybersecurity issues. Thus, firms must be prepared with elaborate contingency plans in case they suffer a significant attack.
References
Alharthi, M. N. A. N., & Khalifa, G. S. (2019). Business continuity management and crisis leadership: an approach to re-engineer crisis performance within Abu Dhabi Governmental entities. International Journal on Emerging Technologies , 10 , 32-40.
Aleksandrova, S. V., Aleksandrov, M. N., & Vasiliev, V. A. (2018). Business Continuity Management System. In 2018 IEEE International Conference" Quality Management, Transport and Information Security, Information Technologies"(IT&QM&IS) (pp. 14-17). IEEE.
Easttom II, W. C. (2013). Network defence and countermeasures: principles and practices . Pearson IT Certification.
Epstein, B., & Khan, D. C. (2014). Application impact analysis: A risk-based approach to business continuity and disaster recovery. Journal of business continuity & emergency planning , 7 (3), 230-237.
Kato, M., & Charoenrat, T. (2018). Business continuity management of small and medium-sized enterprises: Evidence from Thailand. International journal of disaster risk reduction , 27 , 577-587.
Supriadi, L. S. R., & Pheng, L. S. (2018). Business continuity management (BCM). In Business Continuity Management in Construction (pp. 41-73). Springer, Singapore.
Zeng, Z., & Zio, E. (2017). An integrated modelling framework for quantitative business continuity assessment. Process Safety and Environmental Protection , 106 , 76-88.
