Business continuity is crucial for ensuring an organisation can maintain operations during and after disruptions. Effective continuity planning minimises downtime, protects revenue, and preserves customer trust. A key component of risk management, business continuity involves identifying potential risks, assessing their impact, and developing mitigation strategies.

Your business continuity plan needs to have your back for any matter of risks and incidents, including cyber attacks, environmental disasters, problems with technology, and even people leaving the business. The incidents that warrant a business continuity plan happen more often than many organisations expect, leaving them scrambling to find a solution and recover from the incident.

65% of organisations feel that the level of business continuity risk is increasing. During a time where one small bug or incident on an online system can take multiple organisations offline unexpectedly, you need to have your next steps planned out and ready to execute.

Business continuity solutions not only give you peace of mind that your organisation is safe and running no matter what, they also help you meet regulatory, compliance, and security requirements.

What is the purpose of a business continuity plan? 

A business continuity plan (BCP) serves as a comprehensive, extremely detailed document that outlines the procedures your organisation must follow in the event of a disaster.

Your BCP should be easily accessible to all of your employees (and potentially partners and stakeholders) so everyone can access it at all times. Your BCP should establish a clear chain of command and designate roles and responsibilities, ensuring that everyone knows what to do and who to report to during a disruption.

Overall, the purpose of a business continuity plan is to keep everyone informed and calm during an incident, while also enabling you to recover as quickly as possible.

Understanding the need for business continuity planning is essential, but actually putting it into practise is what’s going to make the biggest difference to your organisation. When creating a business continuity plan, you need to:

1. Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA): identify critical business functions and the potential impact of disruptions on these functions. This analysis helps prioritise which areas need the most protection and recovery planning. The planning process often reveals inefficiencies, leading to improved operational efficiency.
2. Identify and assess risks: list potential threats such as natural disasters, cyber attacks, and other emergencies. Assess the likelihood and impact of each threat to determine the level of risk
3. Develop recovery strategies: develop strategies to mitigate risks and recover critical business functions
4. Document procedures: write down all procedures into one easy-to-access document
5. Assign responsibilities: assign specific roles and responsibilities to relevant people in the organisation
6. Implement training: train employees on their roles and responsibilities within the plan
7. Update regularly: continuously review and update the plan to reflect changes in the business environment, new threats, and lessons learned from tests and actual events

Business continuity plans are not a one-size-fits all. Your plan needs to be completely tailored to your organisation and it’s needs, but we understand that this can be challenging for organisations that aren’t familiar with business continuity planning. This is where business continuity solutions come in.

Utilising business continuity solutions to safeguard your organisation 

Business continuity solutions, systems, and tools help organisations that don’t have the time or resources to build a BCP in-house. Taking the complex tasks, business continuity solutions help you:

• Build a strong, highly effective BCP
• Have confidence in the face of increasing threats
• Protect your assets, reputation, and employees against disruption

Our specialists provide a comprehensive, tailored approach that minimises downtime and protects your revenue by maintaining operations during crises.

Our Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Team are on-hand to support with anything business continuity, incident response, and risk management. With both our cyber security incident response plan solution and BIA solution, we have the bandwidth to ensure your organisation is ready to face any manner of threat.