Business Continuity

Besides protecting and backing up your data, it is wise to have a general business continuity plan that will help you maintain critical functions in the event of any major disruption and quickly recover normal operations once the crisis has passed.

These days there is a growing expectation for businesses to have a continuity plan in place. Almost two thirds of businesses are now required by customers to show they have one and nearly three quarters of businesses require the same of their suppliers.

A well formed plan has a number of advantages:

• It gives your business resilience - the ability to adapt and survive in difficult circumstances
• It can strengthen your brand, enhance your reputation, and help you win and retain customers
• In some industries, tested recovery procedures are a legal requirement and failure to demonstrate them can lead to heavy fines
• In certain circumstances a good plan can result in lower insurance premiums
  

Preparing a plan for your business

To prepare a continuity plan for your business you will need to assess potential risks of disruption to your core products or services, establish the minimal level of operation that must be maintained, prepare contingencies to maintain these levels during an incident, and have plans to fully restore operations once the incident has passed.

Needs will vary from business to business but most organisations will need to address the following:

• Do you have back up plans in the event of key staff being unavailable?
• Have you made sure you have no single points of failure among your staff?
• Should your premises become unusable could you transfer operations to an alternative location?
• If alternative premises are not available, do you have arrangements for employees to work remotely but still be able to contact customers, suppliers, and other employees?
• Have you checked with your regular suppliers to see if they have continuity plans and discussed contingencies with them?
• Have you identified alternatives in case any of your regular suppliers fail?
• Do you have easily accessible off site back ups of all your essential records?
• If your IT system is damaged or compromised, say by a virus, do you have access to an alternative system for the duration?

Over the past 15 years Morris Owen have built up an extensive knowledge regarding disaster recovery and business continuity, as well as developing strong working relationships with industry providers, so if you would like to discuss how we can help you with a disaster recovery and/or business continuity plan for your business please contact Ian Sumbler.