Business Continuity Management

1 in 5 businesses suffer a major disruption every year. Yours could be next. With no recovery plan, you have less chance of survival.

Experience has shown that organisations with business continuity arrangements in place are more likely to stay in business and recover quickly in the event of an emergency than those who do not.

Developing a Business Continuity Plan will assist you to manage your risks to ensure that your business can continue operating to at least a pre-determined minimum level. This will enable you to continue service delivery during and beyond a crisis.

What is Business Continuity Management (BCM)?

BCM is a management process that helps manage the risks to the smooth running of an organisation or delivery of a service, ensuring that the business can continue in the event of disruption. These risks could be from the external environment e.g. power failure, severe weather or from with an organisation e.g. systems failure, high staff absenteeism. The primary 'business' of private sector organisations is the generation of profit, a process that BCM seeks to protect. Other organisations provide services to the public, and it is equally important that these are protected.

The Business Continuity Institute has stated that effective BCM is built on the 'seven Ps':

Programme - proactively managing the process
People - roles an responsibilities, awareness and education
Processes - all organisational processes, including ICT
Premises - buildings and facilities
Providers - supply chain, including outsourcing
Profile - brand, image and reputation
Performance - benchmarking, evaluation and audit

The Business Continuity Institute has developed a five-stage process, which has become widely accepted and has been incorporated into a British Standards Institute Policy Available Specification (PAS 56). This model provides a generic framework that is applicable across the public, private and voluntary sectors.

1. Understanding your business

Business impact and risk assessment tools are used to identify the critical deliverables and enablers in your business, evaluating recovery priorities and assessing the risks which could lead to business interruption and/or damage to your organisation's reputation.

2. BCM Strategies

Identifying alternative strategies available to the responder to mitigate loss, assessing their potential effectiveness in maintaining the responder's ability to deliver their critical functions.

3. Developing the response

Developing the response to business continuity challenges and the plans underpinning this.

4. Establishing the continuity culture

This stage looks at the need for responders to ensure that a continuity culture is embedded in their organisation by raising awareness throughout the organisation and its key stakeholders, and offering training to key staff on BCM.