What is Business Continuity

The underlying concept of business continuity is that an organization must have the strategic and tactical capability to plan and respond to business incidents and interruptions, in order to continue business operations at an acceptable predefined level. This chapter proposed an approach to business continuity management in an organization through the definition and implementation of a set of four related phases. The authors integrate the main guidelines, based on the literature review and on good practices and concerns, referred to in the ISO standards and on ITIL, CMMI, and COBIT frameworks. This approach will allow organizations to address the most relevant activities for the development of a business continuity management program. By implementing each of the phase activities, the organization will have a systematic overview of the steps required for an optimized planning and response to business incidents and disruptions, supported by the strategy defined framed within their needs.