The risk assessment is the important first phase of creating your business continuity plan. Think about every conceivable threat to your business processes, large or small, likely or rare. If you’re having a hard time getting started, break the threats into three categories: natural threats, human threats and technical threats.
Natural Threats include events like hurricanes, tornadoes, heavy storms, flooding, fires, earthquakes, heavy winds, tornadoes, aircraft incidents or any type of extreme weather like freezing or heavy snow.
Human Threats include explosions from gas, steam, etc., losing part of your team (say execs lost in a common plane crash), extortion, burglary, embezzlement, bus or train strike, vandalism, riot, robbery, labor unrest, data entry errors, theft of data, building break-in, terrorist activity, a nuclear accident or a pandemic.
Technical Threats are things like power fluctuations or outages, HVAC failures, malfunction or failure of servers or hardware, data loss, telephone outage, loss of Internet access and electromagnetic interference.
What to do with all those threats?
Once you’ve identified all potential threats, rate each one, considering speed of onset, forewarning or not, length of the event, likelihood of occurrence and the impact on each functional areas.
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