“Proper preparation and planning prevents poor performs” or so says the old adage. Nowhere is this more true than in business, where careful strategizing and forward planning can pay dividends. For optimists, preparing for the worst is never a comfortable prospect, but it’s essential for organisations of all sizes to have plans in place to mitigate the effects of disruptive or severely damaging events. These plans are usually referred to as “Business Continuity Plans.”
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a set of pre-defined actions and procedures designed to aid your business in overcoming any disruptive event. Presented in checklist format, a BCP (we’ll abbreviate for convenience) contains a list of actions which aim to mitigate further disruption and help your organisation recover operationally, from events of both natural and human origin. The disruption caused could be either partial or total, it could affect your service delivery, or it could severely impact your internal structures: disruption could take many forms, so it’s vital to prepare for every eventuality.
Some of the most common business-disrupting occurrences include:
- IT outages
- Cyber Attacks and user-initiated data breaches
- Supply chain issues
- On-premise incidents (accidental hardware damage, vandalism, robbery, fire etc.)
- Natural disasters (floods, storm damage…)
You may look at the list above and think: “I have insurance, I’m sure my business could recover from such disasters.” While insurance will recover material losses, significant disruption to your service delivery could damage your reputation as a reliable organisation, and loss of income during the disruption period could take months to recover.
Business continuity isn’t just about ensuring the survival of your business, it’s also about damage mitigation: keeping your business productive and operational throughout the disruptive episode in order to maintain customer satisfaction and revenue resilience. Here are some of the key benefits a Business Continuity Plan can bring:
Risk management
When disaster strikes it’s crucial not to let chaos develop into a crisis that threatens the very survival of your business. A business continuity plan exists to contain the damage and prevent its spread, so that the full recovery process can get underway.
Reputational preservation
Customers, partners and third-party suppliers will likely sympathise with you should you suffer an unfortunate event which affects your ability to operate. However, they’ll also expect you to resume service delivery in a timely manner. If an IT issue, such as a hardware fault, cripples your business for days on end they might lose confidence, and a repeat event might see customers taking their business elsewhere.
Prevent loss of trust
In many sectors customer relationships are built on trust. Many disruptive events have the potential to damage that trust, unless a robust plan of action is in place to preserve client interests.
Take a data breach as an example. Under the GDPR, data breaches often require organisations to inform data subjects that a breach has occurred. If this is required to happen, your customers will want to know about the steps taken and procedures actioned to safeguard their data. Without a robust business continuity plan in place, your customers might feel as though you’ve subjected their data to unacceptable levels of risk, and will likely take their business elsewhere.
Quality Assurance
Business disruption can take many forms, and often it’s only partial in nature, affecting specific systems, processes and end products. A good business continuity plan will have contingencies in place to backup and recover specific systems, replace damaged hardware, repair physical infrastructure or replace affected personnel. Even if disruption isn’t business-critical, customers are good at spotting operational hiccups which affect the quality of the product they receive, making swift recoverability vital, no matter what’s affected.
Revenue loss mitigation
There has never been a truer saying than “time is money.” A 2014 report found the average cost of network downtime globally to be $5600, with the same figure for SMEs being in the low hundreds. Whether you rely heavily on IT or not, businesses across all sectors recognise the importance or uninterrupted service delivery in terms of revenue flow. A business continuity plan should prioritise speed of service resumption, to ensure that downtime losses are minimised.
In our next article we’ll explore the process of creating a business continuity plan: the factors you should consider and how to build your BCP framework.
Why choose JMV solutions?
Since 2012, JMV Solutions has provided IT Support for a wide range of small and medium sized businesses throughout Devon and Cornwall. From our base in Newton Abbott, we serve businesses in Exeter, Torquay, Plymouth and beyond. Our company is formed of a personable, friendly and expert team of IT and Security experts that have your best interests at heart. We protect your business, your valuable data, and help sustain your compliance requirements against a rapidly growing cyber threat. Contact us today to learn more.
