Business continuity management - Structuring and putting it into practice

Business continuity is a major management issue for organizations. In regulated sectors (e.g. banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals), it is even an obligation in terms of risk management. In other sectors, it is becoming an essential issue for several reasons: companies faced with business interruptions suffer several categories of impact. Operating loss, the financial consequence of a business interruption, is often one of the key issues of a business continuity plan (BCP), which means ensuring the continuity of the most critical processes, as well as resuming activity as quickly as possible when continuity is not guaranteed. This subject is so important that, in practice, the notion of resilience is increasingly associated with BCP (see [G 9 068] , ). Other key issues in business continuity are controlling reputational risk and quality of service.

In some sectors, maintaining this business continuity is also a regulatory obligation, which can amount to a risk control failure in the event of a breach.

This is not a new subject in itself; as early as the 1950s, work and reflection were highlighting the importance of business continuity in terms of both financial and safety issues, as illustrated by the 1955 Le Mans 24-hour race accident, which resulted in a desire to guarantee the continuation of activity after a serious accident . Numerous other examples of organizations and companies in the media since then illustrate the importance of BCP, not only for preventing and limiting the impact of crises, but also for asking the right organizational questions. Business continuity is a process, i.e. a set of coordinated activities involving different organizational functions, with objectives (guaranteeing business continuity, managing emergencies, enabling business resumption) and input data transformed into output data (generally resources and actions dedicated to business continuity, such as the organization of back-up plans and...