The Business Continuity Planning Program is intended to provide a framework for developing plans to ensure the safety of employees and the resumption of time sensitive operations and services in the event of an emergency such as fire, power or communications blackout, hurricane, flood or civil disturbance. Although the program provides guidance and documentation on which to base Emergency Response, Resumption and Recovery planning efforts, it is not intended as a substitute for informed decision-making.	Business managers and accountable executives must identify services for which disruption will result in significant financial and/or operational losses. Plans will detail responsibilities and tasks for use in responding to emergencies and resuming operations based upon pre-defined timeframes. Depending upon the type of incident, plans may need to be executed for four essential planning phases. Each phase assumes that the alternate sites and materials necessary to support the resumption and recovery processes are in place (i.e. business resumption center, computer backup site, off-site backup files, etc.).
These are the issues that all organizations must address for continuity of operations and resumption/recovery of their business operations. MM&I has assisted companies in all business sectors in managing, implementing and maintaining their Business Continuity Programs.
Response Planning for and/or implementing the organization’s response to an incident or emergency. The goals of this phase include the protection of life, limiting and containing damage to facilities and equipment, stabilization of operational, service and public image impacts of an event; and to manage and communicate information about the incident.	Resumption This phase involves initial resumption and production processing support for time-sensitive business operations and related computer and application systems. It covers the period from the point of interruption up to 8 hours. During this period of time, little or no computer test and development work will be done and some business processes and computer applications may not be fully restored.
Recovery: This phase involves those less time-sensitive business operations. The duration of this phase varies depending on the length of time required to resume time-sensitive operations and activate any alternate site(s), acquire expanded recovery resources and the terms and conditions of in-force contracts.	Restoration of Facilities and Contents:  During this phase, all transferred business and computer processing operations will be migrated from the alternate site(s) to the restored primary site or relocated to a new structure. Normal business operations and services will be re-established at the primary site and post-recovery operations will be completed.
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