Business continuity focuses on your ability to maintain essential functions during and after an incident has occurred. The most basic business continuity requirement is to keep essential functions up and running during a period of disruption and to recover as quickly as possible.
Nearly one in five businesses suffers a major disruption every year and disruptions can come in a variety of forms, such as:
- an electricity supply failure
- IT networks outage
- damage due to flooding or fire
- telephone outage for a day or longer
- no access to your property
- a malware or ransomware cyber-attack.
The impact of climate change means we are more likely to see increased flooding and more extreme weather events that can disrupt your business and your supply chain and distribution channels. Other issues may be staff health levels, disruption to water supply, a restricted power grid impact and additional legislation to adhere to.
Effective business continuity planning helps to ensure that during times of disruption your business continues to operate essential functions and will support a quicker recovery.
Before you develop your business continuity plan, you will need to identify your critical activities and assets, which you need to be performed to deliver key products and services.
By determining the impact that a disruption will have on these activities you will need to look at what resources you need to maintain them to an acceptable level.
This will allow you to estimate the impacts of disruption and establish your response, recovery priorities and the resource requirements. Once you have done this, you can start developing your business continuity plan.
As an overview, business continuity plans should contain:
- The roles and responsibilities of who will activate the plan, including contact details
- What critical functions and activities need to be recovered, timescales and recovery levels needed
- What resources will be available to deliver critical activities during the first 24hrs and up to two weeks from the event
- Actions to be carried out, in what timescale and who will do these
- A clear communication process
- Process for standing down and returning to normal business.
Once you have developed your plan you will need to regularly review it and ensure staff know their roles in an emergency. You should test your plan with key staff involved, which can be done through a tabletop exercise. All plans should be reviewed whenever there are any major changes with the business.
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