Engineering Homework Help

As you learned in Chapter 13 of your textbook, BCPs help organizations prepare for a major disaster or disruption in their operations. Natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, can cause power outages that could severely impact business operations and IT systems. Unforeseen circumstances, such as a hack, data breach, or poorly planned business change, can also impact operations and a business’s IT infrastructures. For this week’s discussion, you and your peers will have the opportunity to reflect on BCPs.

For your initial post, select one of the scenarios below and answer the questions relating to it. Be sure you state which scenario you have selected in your post.

Scenario One
Imagine you work for an organization that has business liability insurance, asset replacement insurance, and natural disaster insurance. Does your organization still need a BCP? Why or why not?

Scenario Two
Imagine you are conducting a BCP for a small auto-parts supply business. As you are creating the BCP for the organization, you realize that it cannot afford to keep more than seven days’ worth of supplies on site. What would you suggest to the owner of the small business, and why?

In your response to your peers:

• Explain whether you agree or disagree with the initial poster, and with the comments of those who have already responded
• Provide another rationale or suggestion based on the scenario selected

Peers posts:

King Chang posted Oct 18, 2021 11:27 AM

Hello Dr. Rob and Classmates:

Congratulations to those that have made it to this 8th and final week of this class! My choice for this week’s discussion is scenario one. This organization needs business continuity plan (BCP) just like any business needs one if they plan on long-term success in their given field. The amount of insurance that this organization holds will cover certain financial risks with the insurance companies that underwrite the polices, but how the company operates during a time of natural disaster or any disaster is not something an insurance policy can offer but instead the responsibility is left up to the stakeholders in the organization to mitigate a disaster (Gibson,2015 Ch.13). A BCP should be developed to identify critical business functions (CBF), critical process supporting the CBF’s, critical IT assets and the determination of maximum acceptable outage (MAO) of these functions (Gibson,2015 Ch.13). Organization’s that don’t employ a BCP as a part of understanding their total risk exposure are left to create a BCP during a time of crisis which often generates chaos within an organization because tasks are defensive in nature and more effort is made at damage control versus recovery of key systems in order to get CBF’s back to 100%. A BCP is a road map for an organization to identify critical business functions, who’s in charge during a disaster and the support required to get all critical business functions back online, the organization’s that choose to march forward without a business continuity plan (BCP) are usually the ones you read about in the media (Gibson, 2015 Ch. 13). Thank you Dr. Rob for your guidance this term! I wish everyone good luck in the pursuit of your education goals! Have a great day. King Chang

Reference:

Gibson, D. (2015) Managing Risk in Information Systems. Jones & Bartlett Learning. https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/managing-risk-in/9781284055955/02_tit.xhtml

Kiersten Dyer posted Oct 18, 2021 12:43 PM

Hello class! For this discussion I’ve chosen scenario number 1.

Business continuity plans should be used in conjunction with insurance coverage. “Insurance coverage without a BC plan implies that your BC strategy is to hope an event does not occur.” (Long, 2017) A business continuity plan is a guide for crisis situations such as natural disaster or cyber attack. It is not a question of if an organization will encounter a crisis situation, but when. When a crisis does occur, the business will have the BCP as a blueprint to follow to restore critical business functions and to reduce the impact of the event on the organization. Insurance would play a role in the contingency portion of a BCP as one of the tools in restoring normal business functions.

It’s been a pleasure being in class with you all!

References

Long, R. (2017, August 22). The difference between business continuity and insurance. MHA Consulting. https://www.mha-it.com/2017/08/22/business-continuity-and-insurance/