The following are key terms relevant to business continuity planning and will be referred to throughout the course.

Business continuity plan: A document containing all of the information required to ensure that your business is able to resume critical business activities should a crisis/disaster occur.

Business continuity planning: A process that helps develop a plan document to manage the risks to a business, ensuring that it can operate to the extent required in the event of a crisis/disaster.

Business impact analysis: The process of gathering information to determine basic recovery requirements for your key business activities in the event of a crisis/disaster.

Key business activities: Those activities essential to deliver outputs and achievement of business objectives.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The time from which you declare a crisis/disaster to the time that the critical business functions must be fully operational in order to avoid serious financial loss.

Resources: The means that support delivery of an identifiable output and/or result. Resources may be money, physical assets, or most importantly, people.

Risk management: The process of defining and analysing risks, and then deciding on the appropriate course of action in order to minimise these risks, whilst still achieving business goals.