How to develop a successful business continuity plan

Press

This article has been designed to help and advise businesses on how to maintain business continuity in the event of potential threats occurring. It offers advice on preventative security measures businesses can take to ensure that natural or manmade disasters do not have an unduly adverse effect on their business and its activities.

If your business is not fully prepared for security threats, then you could suffer a loss of business, reputation and serious financial and corporate liability issues.

Business continuity planning should involve five stages:

1. Analyse your business
   In order to create an effective business continuity plan, it is vital that you are clear about what you need to achieve. This involves looking at every aspect of your business and assessing potential security risks. It should also take into account the opinions of everyone within the business, from boardroom to shop floor, and integrate any existing provisions for security threats.


2. Security risk assessment
   The next step is to assess the potential risks that your business faces, looking at the likelihood of these issues and the potential effects these may have on your operations. Many businesses tend to look at security risk assessment in cost terms and prioritise prevention of threats to limit financial impact. Businesses are well advised to look at worst case scenarios and to take into account the activities of third parties to ensure that they are fully prepared for all eventualities.


3. Strategise
   Once you have identified the security risks, it is important to put in place strategies to deal with them. As previously mentioned, this will largely depend on financial implications, with many organisations deciding that certain risks are worth ignoring if the cost of preventing them is significantly higher than the chances of them occurring. Instead of putting in place measures to prevent risk, some companies decide it more worthwhile to have contingency plans in place for after the event. This may involve a reciprocal arrangement with another company to ensure that there is support after an incident has occurred.


4. Develop a plan
   A business continuity plan should include details of the roles that everyone within the organisation should play in the event of a crisis. The plan should be written in simple language and should include clear instructions for users to follow. In order to be effective, it is vital that business continuity planning is an ongoing process and that you constantly change and update plans to make provision for changing circumstances.


5. Rehearse
   The only way to check whether or not a plan works is to put it into action. This should involve gathering the necessary personnel together to act out a scenario and then ironing out any potential issues in dealing successfully with the threat.