What is Business Continuity?
While disaster recovery plans cover the steps businesses take to recover, in the aftermath of a disaster, business continuity describes the procedures that businesses operate in order to ensure their business essential functions can continue during and after a disaster. Business continuity plans allow organisations to enhance their ability to continue business as usual during or after significant disruptions.
3 Key Elements of Business Continuity:
Resilience:
- Redundancy
- High Availability
- Spare Capacity
It is important that business critical functions and the supporting infrastructure are engineered in such a way that they are materially unaffected by most disruptions.
Recovery:
- Disaster Recovery
Arrangements need to be made to recover or restore business functions that fail for any reason, this is usually where you Disaster Recovery plan comes in!
Contingency:
- Protect against the unforeseen
- Multisite capability (Workplace Recovery)
As a business you need to establish the ability to cope effectively with whatever major incident or disaster that occurs, including the unexpected. Contingency preparations act as a last-resort response for if the resilience and recovery arrangements are not enough.
What to include in a Business Continuity Plan?
A Business Continuity plan is essentially a document that contains all the critical information your business needs to stay up and running, especially in the case of adverse events. It is vital that you tailor the business continuity plan to the specific needs of your business. A good place to start is by clearly identifying and prioritising which systems and processes must be sustained and provide all the necessary information for maintaining them.
A business continuity plan should also include the following information:
- Employee contact list
- Key Supplier/Vendor information
- Key contacts/Critical telephone numbers
- Recovery Locations
- Copies of essential records
- Inventory of the company’s equipment/machinery/vehicles
- Inventory of the company’s computer equipment and software
- Disaster response plan
Plan for the Unexpected!
Businesses that do not have some form of Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan in place are less likely to recover from an event which causes major disruption to business. In fact over 70% of businesses involved in a major disaster either never reopen or subsequently fail shortly after reopening, often due to a lack of client confidence or customers taking their business to a competitor.
For help creating a comprehensive business continuity plan for your business call Practical Networks on 01723 587240 or email recovery@practicalnetworks.co.uk
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