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Business continuity

Is your business prepared for the worse?

Major emergencies can develop suddenly and without warning. Situations can threaten and disrupt your business and impact upon you and your staff. Having invested heavily in your business, you need to ensure it remains safe, secure and viable. Being better informed and better prepared to deal with emergencies has a wide range of benefits and is good business practice, it also reassures your customers and suppliers that you take the resilience and security of your business seriously: it is good for you, your staff, your business and your reputation.

What is business continuity?

Business Continuity is a planning process that's aim is to manage the risks and ensure continuity as much as possible in the event of disruption to your business. Business Continuity helps organisations anticipate, prepare for, prevent, respond and recover from disruptions, whatever their source and whatever aspect of the business they may affect.

What does business continuity planning Involve?

The business continuity management (BCM) life cycle is a phased, iterative process consisting of five stages.

In this section:

Stage 1 - Understanding your business
Business impact and risk assessment tools are used to identify the critical deliverables and enablers in your business, evaluating recovery priorities and assessing the risks which could lead to business interruption and/or damage to your organisation's reputation
Stage 2 - business continuity management strategies
Determining the selection of alternative strategies available to mitigate loss, assessing the relative merits of these against the business environment and their likely effectiveness in maintaining the organisation's critical functions
Stage 3 - developing the response
Improving the risk profile through improvements to operational procedures and practices, implementing alternative business strategies, using risk financing measures (including insurance) and building BCPs
Stage 4 - establishing the continuity culture
Introduction of the BCM process by education and awareness of all stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders
Stage 5 - exercising and plan maintenance
Ongoing plan testing, audit and change management of the BCP and its processes
Why use a business continuity plan?
A well-developed, structured and rehearsed business continuity plan (BCP) will assist your business in recovering from an incident as quickly as possible when faced with a risk