Today’s businesses are not willing to take any risk of losing their business. But businesses are facing risk in the form of natural disaster, human error, terrorist attacks, and in many forms. Natural catastrophes like flooding, hurricanes or earthquakes can occur at any time; an anger employee may break into information system and steel some significant information, which may cause loss to business. In this type of situations companies must resume their business to normal operations as quickly as possible to continue their business. To do so many businesses started developing Business Continuity Planning. According to the Business Continuity Institute a business continuity plan is

“A document containing the recovery timeline methodology, tested- validated documentation, procedures, and action instructions developed specifically for use in restoring organization operations in the event of a declared disaster. To be effective, most Business Continuity Plans also require testing, skilled personnel, access to vital records, and alternate recovery resources including facilities”.

In other words Business Continuity Planning is a properly written document with procedures and information, which will help a business to continue after unexpected events of an emergency or disaster.

Objectives of Business Continuity Planning:

• To minimize the amount of loss
• Provide an immediate, accurate, and measured response to emergency situations
• Facilitate to resume the critical business functions within a predetermined period of time
• Procedures and resources to restore critical business functions and IT applications
• Procedures must be documented in a clear way so that a knowledgeable person can execute them
• Describe the alternatives to restore critical operations.