An effective Business Continuity Plan (BCP) typically includes IT disaster recovery plus contingency/backup plans for critical business operations.  Most BCPs focus on restoring key business functions in terms of relocating facilities, machinery, people or equipment so that the operations necessary to keep the business alive can be carried on even if the business is hit with a flood, fire, blizzard, etc.  This is all very important to have in place.  But what many BCPs do not consider is loss of key people in the organization.  The BPC may have answers to “what happens when the warehouse is under water?”  or “what happens when the online order system goes down?”; this presumes the disruptive vent will be some sort of physical “disaster”.  But what about the question “what happens when the only person in the company who knows how to make product X leaves?  or gets sick?”.  What happens if the CEO / owner of a company leaves or passes on?  Then what?

​Years ago when I got involved in what was then called “Business Assurance Planning”, the top threats to sustain business operations were fire, power outage, and natural disasters like floods, bad weather, earthquake.  All of the contingency planning centered around finding another location work out of and making sure IT systems were backed up with copies stored off site.  Then Y2K brought awareness of the vulnerabilities of all the IT systems we rely upon, even in the absence of a natural disaster, and we started to think about how we would operate if our IT systems stopped functioning.