About business continuity planning
Businesses are used to assessing and planning for commercial risks, such as the sudden loss of an important customer or supplier, a bad debt or industrial action.
But, increasingly, a wider range of events can also have a major impact on the prosperity, or even survival of your business.
Recent events around the world have shown that terrorist or climatic events can affect businesses. For example, 58% of UK businesses report that they were disrupted as a result of September 11, with 1 in 8 severely affected.
Preparing for unexpected events
Companies often fail to prepare for events that can have a significant impact on their operations.
Fire safety measures may be commonplace, but flood mitigation measures are rare.
However, the reality is that the risks of a flood or other severe weather events are higher than that of a fire.
Apart from terrorist activities and flooding, other unexpected events might include:
accidents / burglary / vandalism
natural disaster (eg extreme weather)
interruption to power supplies
shortage of essential resources or raw materials
infectious disease outbreaks
Creating a business continuity management plan
Business continuity management is about your organisation assessing risks that could affect it.
It helps you to identify where your business might be vulnerable and to plan your response to any adverse event.
It will help keep the impact of an incident to a minimum which will help your business to return to normal operations as quickly as possible.
Benefits of creating a business continuity plan
You are more likely to stay in business after an incident if you have a business continuity plan in place.
You'll be more prepared and better equipped to help yourselves.
Insurance companies also expect businesses to have these preparations in place more and more.
If you're a larger business, you may need to get specialist help from professional consultants.
How to create your own business continuity management plan
To help you with creating your own plan, download and read the toolkit below.
Download the business continuity toolkit (size 2mb)
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