Creating a business continuity plan

Below are some questions you might like to consider when preparing a business continuity plan.

• Stakeholders – Who are your key stakeholders? This may include, for example:
  • One or more types of customers – registrants, resellers, those who make use of other services you provide;
  • Owners or investors;
  • Registries whose domain names you sell; etc.
• Critical services – What are the critical services that your company or organisation provides? What do your customers rely on you to do for them? If all of your services were unavailable for some reason, what is the priority order for bringing them back online?
• Supporting activities – What are the key supporting activities for these critical services? Are you relying on any third parties?
• Risks – What are the potential risks to these activities? What could prevent you from carrying out these activities?
• Running your business in an emergency – How will you ensure that these activities can be maintained in the event of an emergency (loss of access to premises and/or systems, loss of data, loss of personnel etc)? Can alternative arrangements be made for any of these activities?

At Nominet we have followed the process set out above and developed a business continuity policy. You are welcome to adapt elements of it to suit your own needs.

Our business continuity policy is supported by business continuity plans and processes, appropriate to the size of our company and the services that we provide to our customers, and meets the ISO 22301 certification requirements. This may not be appropriate for you, and another methodology may be more appropriate for the type of business that you operate. In this case, we ask you to provide information about your current business continuity setup in your statement.