What is a BCP Review
What should you expect from a BCP Review?
A BCP review is basically an assessment of a business continuity plan and is normally normally conducted by a third party specialist who should provide advice and guidance on the content and scope of the plan. A BCP review will ultimately consider whether the business continuity plan appears to be soundly based on the organisations business continuity needs and the internal management process of ensuring that the plan remains relevant and current.
A BCP review then, will give you comfort that your plan covers all of the right things such as:
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Identifying your operational priorities
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Identifying the parts of your organisation's infrastructure that support these priorities and their recovery capability
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The management structure that is place to manage incidents and undertake recovery of impacted activities
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A framework for communicating with affected parties - including colleagues, customers
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Policies and processes to ensure the ongoing effectiveness and relevance of the business continuity plan
What should you NOT expect from a BCP Review?
A BCP review will not prove that your business continuity plan actually works - to do that you need to test it. BCP Reviews are primarily based on the documents you have developed - whilst documents are necessary (how else would we present information?) they are not reality. The only way that you can really obtain assurance that your plan will work as envisaged is to test it based on specific disruption scenarios.
Overall, a BCP review will provide you with the assurance that your plan is based on sound assumptions and is fit for testing. In this context the BCP review will help you to ensure that your plan is not full of obvious holes and basic shortcomings that would make a testing exercise a complete waste of time until the areas of deficiency were remediated.
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