Anne Tramposh
CSS150-1304A-02
Introduction to Computer Security
Professor Mark Ford
10/26/2013

Business Continuity Implementation Planning
A Business Continuity Plan is “a plan for how to handle outages to IT systems, applications and data access in order to maintain business operation. A Business Impact Analysis is a prerequisite analysis for a Business continuity plan that prioritizes mission critical systems, applications and data and the impact of an outage or downtime.” (Kim. 2012. Pg.478)
Every organization faces risk. Sometimes risk is measurable and predictable, and other times it is not. For example, a lawn care company knows that it has a seasonal business. There is some unpredictability in the seasons in that you do not know for sure if it is going to be a “wet” spring or a “dry” spring, or a hot summer or a cooler summer and so on. However, at least in the Midwest, a lawn care company can pretty well determine that we will have winter, spring, summer and fall. Additionally, it is predictable that the grass will need mowing from about mid to late March all the way through November. So, there is a small risk that it may start a little later and/or end a little sooner, but on the average it is fairly predictable.
Other organizations have much greater risk inherent in their organizations. For example, a small stock brokerage firm may lose its entire business if stocks take the type of tumble that they did in 1998. (I personally know of some small firms that did just that – many family firms that had been in business for over 60 years.)
Just as risk can be defined from an organizational standpoint, risk can also be defined with regard to Information Technology. For a Security Professional, “risk is the likelihood that a particular threat exposes a vulnerability that can damage (an) organization.” (Kim. 2012. Pg 250.) In order to determine the