There are many risks which may threaten an organisation by disrupting its business processes. These risks include traditional emergencies like fires, floods, earthquakes and tornados as well as risks from physical and cyber terrorism, cybercrime, computer and telecomm failures, theft, employee sabotage and strikes. Any one of these can be very disruptive for your organisation.

Business continuity is about ensuring the organisation can survive these events. The business continuity process identifies those activities which are critical to the organisation and then ascertains how time critical each of them are. The process identifies which activities need to be restored quickly in minutes and hours from those which can wait days and even months before needing to be restored. It also looks at whether the time criticality of the activities changes throughout the year e.g. submitting of company accounts may increase in importance as the financial 'year end' approaches. The process looks at the recovery requirements needed to operate the organisation's activities at a minimum level. Recovery requirements include the minimum number of desk spaces, IT, telephony, plant, equipment, staff, vehicles and paper records needed to operate the organisation. Once the time critical activities and the recovery requirements are identified, then a strategy is devised which ensures that they can be restored as required.

The recovery strategy is then written up into a plan and an incident management structure is devised to implement and control the recovery. All staff need to be aware of the plan and how the organisation would recover. Staff named in the plan need to be trained in their role and then the plan must be exercised. Once all this is carried out then the circle of updating the plans, training staff and carrying out exercises needs to be repeated on, at least, a yearly basis.

Carrying out business continuity within an organisation is unlikely to save any money but it will serve to minimise disruptions and financial loss during even minor events. This means increased reliability and productivity for your company, competitive advantage and the ability to demonstrate to customers that you have a resilient organisation which is less susceptible to a disruptive event than your competitors who have not implemented business continuity.

Further Reading

> Business Continuity Testing