Imagine if half of your employees got sick at the same time. Could your business keep running? What if they felt fine but were told to stay home for public health reasons, like with the H1N1 virus? Would they still be able to work productively from home?
These aren’t hypothetical questions anymore. Events like pandemics, cyberattacks, or natural disasters can interrupt operations without warning. That’s why every business — large or small — should have a Business Continuity Plan (BCP).
A Business Continuity Plan is exactly what it sounds like: a plan to help your company keep running during and after a disaster. It’s more than just backing up data — it’s about making sure your core operations can continue even when your normal setup is disrupted.
A consultant who helped Jazz Air LP (which operates as Air Canada Jazz) develop their BCP, puts it like this: a BCP is designed to keep the business going and get it back to normal as quickly as possible.
Jazz took this seriously. On June 16, they ran a full 24-hour test of their BCP using a backup operations center in Burnside. Everything went smoothly.
The consultant led the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) portion of the project. That part focuses on getting IT systems back online — a key piece of any BCP.
Creating the plan took Jazz about two years and involved dozens of employees from different departments. But for an airline running over 880 flights a day, that investment made sense.
“We’ve built the system redundancies we need to support operations during a major disruption,” said Mike MacKinnon, Director of Systems Operations Control at Jazz. “Safety is always our top priority.”
Security and access control must be maintained just like in your primary location.
Once your plan is written, test it. Then test it again. Run simulations, tweak the process, and update the documentation based on what you learn.
It’s not a “set it and forget it” document. Assign someone to own the plan and make regular updates. Keep training your staff so everyone knows what to do in a crisis.
You don’t need to build a full backup operations center like Jazz did. But you do need a plan.
Don’t assume that storing backup tapes off-site or using a cloud service means you’re covered. A good BCP includes all parts of your operation — not just IT. Think about power, phones, internal communication, and who does what when things go wrong.
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