Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

Strategic Pre-Incident Changes

The company should have in place strategic pre-disaster mitigation plans, while assigning the risks levels of priority and designing an immediate action plan. This step allows the actions to be taken when a disaster strikes. The company should produce guidelines that direct the staff and customers in case of an emergency. Actions such as providing information at strategic places to inform the staff and visitors of any incidence are highly anticipated.

The company should place policies in every office to keep updating the staff of actions that should be taken to protect themselves, the company, and its property. Policies may include data security, accidents safety, and directives guiding operations of the machineries and other company operations.

The company has responsibilities of performing training and drilling to the staff to prepare them for any emergency inside and outside the company. Trained staff can handle disasters and ensure less damage and loss of property when such cases happen. The company needs to perform these three major pre-incident preparations to curb any incident should it arise. With security guidelines strategically placed on the company premises, data security guidelines, and proper trainings and drills, the company can be able to handle if an incident occurs.

Ethical Use and Protection of Sensitive Data

The company has important detailed information about the customers, the staff, and confidential information about its own operations. Other important information includes vendor information, contracts, patents, and trademarks that should be protected. The following should be done to ensure business continuity.

Information should be protected by assigning a special department to deal with records. Information of the company should be protected by trusted staff who have access to passwords and sources of such information. Every employee accessing important information should be trained to keep it confidential. The staff's computers should have passwords that are only known by them and a few top members.

Data should be backed by having strong back-ups maintained by the company or a secure external place where the third parties cannot access it. Data should continuously be backed up in the process of its collecting. Two systems that receive the data simultaneously are recommended to make the company's data information safe. The data should be recovered by having secondary back-ups or the other source that simultaneously stores data.

Ethical Use and Protection of Customer Records

The company has confidential information about contractors, customers and other important stakeholders. There are important ways to protect this information, like having security codes that ensure no unauthorized persons access this information. Employees should also be trained not to expose this information to ensure that customers and contractors are protected. The data from customers should be actively stored using at least two back-ups to ensure safety and presence of crucial information. The data can be recovered by having more back-ups that can be accessible when the original data is lost. The company should ensure encryption, strong passwords, obscurity of a web browser, when using it, to prevent outsiders from using it.

Communication Plan to be used in a Disaster

In case of a disaster, like an earthquake, a flood, or loss of important data, the company should ensure a quick access to the information to all involved stakeholders. Stakeholders like employees, vendors, suppliers, producers, government agencies, and other members, top management for example, should be first informed to take necessary measures. The company should have strategic places to assemble, for instance, a fire assembling point, to provide aid in case of disasters. Communication channels and means should be ready to inform people about the progress in handling the disaster (Naughton, 2013). There should be communication tools for people to apply safety measures already mentioned in the pre-incident stage.

Restoring Operations

When a problem like a disaster happens, the company should plan a back-work formula where the most important procedures can be handled first. The company should reform and repair the premises if any problem arises, then call back the employees to start working.

Data recovery can be done by assessing the previous records of data either from their back up or vendors who could be hired to keep information. There should be many sources of secondary data that can be recovered in case of total data loss at the company. Having multiple sources of information can help in regenerating information. Techniques like keeping clients’ information through creating their accounts on the company website, which is supported by vendors and the internal IT department, should be encouraged.