Business Continuity is ensuring your company has a suitable level of service and delivery when disruptive events occur.
80% of businesses (without a Business Continuity Plan) that experience a major event never re-open or subsequently close within 18 months.
Therefore, as a business, whether big or small, having a lot of customers or a few, applying Business Continuity in your organisation can mean the difference between failing and surviving after an event, such as a fire.
The types of disruptions businesses might encounter vary but may include:
- Loss of premises.
- Staff shortages.
- Loss of utilities.
- Loss of Information Communications and Technology systems.
- Loss of vehicles.
- Loss of supply chain.
The main principles of Business Continuity are:
- Identifying your organisation’s critical activities, as in the things you need to do to provide your service/product.
- Identifying the threats to the services/products, for example, natural hazards, cyber-attack, loss of staff, etc.
- Planning for recovery and how the organisation will continue to function, when will systems and processes need to be recovered by and how.
- Training staff and exercising plans, so that you can be confident planning arrangements will work.
- Maintaining arrangements by updating plans and other documents regularly. Business Continuity should be embedded into your organisation so that its application becomes second nature to staff.
For more advice please contact your local authority.
