Business continuity planning (BCP, also called business continuity and resiliency planning BCRP)

identifies an organization's exposure to internal and external threats and synthesizes hard and soft
assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, while maintaining
competitive advantage and value system integrity
Elliot et al. 1999[1]
A business continuity plan is a plan to continue operations if a place of business (e.g., an office,
work site or data center) is affected by adverse physical conditions, such as a storm, fire or crime.
Such a plan typically explains how the business would recover its operations or move operations to
another location. For example, if a fire destroys an office building or data center, the people and
business or data center operations would relocate to a recovery site.
The plan could include recovering from different levels of disaster which can be short term, localized
disasters, to days long building wide problems, to a permanent loss of a building.
Examples: Office building disasters - a roof leaks in an office building, then move the people to
another floor in the same building; the building loses electrical power or is flooded, then have people
work from home during the outage; the building burns and is completely destroyed, then relocate the
people to a recovery site until a new building is acquired.
Computer center disasters - a server breaks, then recover to a backup server; the electrical power is
out, then start an emergency generator, the datacenter is destroyed by a fire, then recover to a
computer disaster recovery datacenter.
In the US, government entities refer to the process as continuity of operations planning (COOP).[2]
Any event that could negatively impact operations is included in the plan, such as supply
chain interruption, loss of or damage to critical infrastructure (major machinery or computing
/network resource). As such, risk management must be incorporated as part of BCP.[3]
In December 2006, the British Standards Institution (BSI) released an independent standard for BCP
BS 25999-1. Prior to the introduction of BS 25999, BCP professionals relied on information
security standard BS 7799, which only peripherally addressed BCP to improve an organization's
information security procedures. BS 25999's applicability extends to all organizations. In 2007, the
BSI published BS 25999-2 "Specification for Business Continuity Management", which specifies
requirements for implementing, operating and improving a documented business continuity
management system (BCMS).
Business continuity management is standardised across the UK by British Standards (BS) through
BS 25999-2:2007 and BS 25999-1:2006. BS 25999-2:2007 business continuity management is the
British Standard for business continuity management across all organizations. This includes industry
and its sectors. The standard provides a best practice framework to minimize disruption during

unexpected events that could bring business to a standstill. The document gives you a practical plan
to deal with most eventualities from extreme weather conditions to terrorism, IT system failure and
staff sickness.[4]
This document was superseded in November 2012 by the British standard BS ISO22301:2012.[5]
In 2004, following crises in the preceding years, the UK government passed the Civil Contingencies
Act 2004 (The Act). This provides the legislation for civil protection in the UK.
The Act was separated into two distinct parts: Part 1 focuses on local arrangements for civil
protection, establishing a statutory framework of roles and responsibilities for local responders. Part
2 focused on emergency powers, establishing a modern framework for the use of special legislative
measures that might be necessary to deal with the effects of the most serious emergency.
The Act is telling responders and planners that businesses need to have continuity planning
measures in place in order to survive and continue to thrive whilst working towards keeping the
incident as minimal as possible.[6]

Referen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_continuity_planning