Business continuity planning – can you afford to be without it?

7 Jun, 2019

When it comes to business continuity, you have to see the bigger picture. Failure to anticipate and plan for a major outage has repercussions not only for your business but for your customers and even to their customers too.

As a supplier, you have a duty to ensure that your business continuity plans are realistic and, as far as possible, have been tested.

Burying your head in the sand

It’s no use thinking that significant disruptions won’t happen to your business or you’ll deal with them if they happen. Leave it, and it’ll be too late.

The ideal time to identify risks is when you’re not in a crisis mode.

You need time and a clear mind to carefully evaluate potential risks and ensure you have mitigated them as much as possible.

You  also need to embrace your inner pessimist as you research risks. Even unlikely risks need to be evaluated and mitigated as this top ten potential threat to business list shows:

Source: The Business Continuity Institute’s Horizon Scan Report 2019.

What’s a good benchmark for business continuity?

When it comes to business continuity, we recommend a gap analysis  to identify where you need to focus your attention. This involves having a knowledgeable consultant coming into your business to ask questions and provide advice. Their report will show where your current processes sit against ISO 22301, the Business Continuity Management Standard.

Even if you decide not to certificate against the ISO 22301 Standard, many companies find it helpful to use it as a benchmark, partly because it’s internationally recognised and partly because standards are regularly updated so aligning with a standard means you’re keeping up with best practice.

Once you have assessed your strengths and shortcomings, and taken remedial action where necessary, you can build a business continuity plan that will help your business cope with whatever is thrown at it.

 

 

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