Business Continuity Planning and Consulting

These days, businesses can’t afford to have a single minute of downtime. Outages can result in the loss of productivity, customers, and could have a negative revenue impact. They can even have long-lasting impact on the brand equity and reputation of your business. Your enterprise needs cost-effective business continuity management services that can reduce unexpected disruptions without costing a fortune.

What is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan is essentially a plan to continue operations if your business is affected by different levels of disaster and how to return to ‘business as usual’ in the quickest possible time afterwards.

Business continuity is about identifying those parts of your business that you cannot afford to lose – such as customer information and how to maintain these if an incident occurs.

A business continuity plan will set out clear roles and responsibilities, it lists a series of contingencies that enable key business activities to continue in even the most difficult circumstances and most importantly sets out clear emergency procedures to ensure the safety of employees.

How does business continuity planning differ from a disaster recovery plan?

Although the two have a lot in common, a business continuity plan should not be confused with a disaster recovery plan.

Disaster Recovery Plans should be orientated towards business recovery following a disaster and mitigating the negative consequences of a disaster. It primarily focuses on the recovery of IT or data.

Whereas business continuity plans focus on creating a plan of action that prevents the negative consequences of a disaster from occurring at all. So ensuring a crisis is managed effectively before it escalates to a disaster.

Business continuity planning is a complex and important activity that affects all businesses, it is hoped that the business continuity plan is never required however in the event that it is needed the plan is designed so that your business recovers efficiently following a disaster so that service disruptions are minimised and managed.

A study conducted by Quorum highlighted the lack of preparation that threatens to derail many organisations. Only a third of UK businesses (34 percent) are able to recover from disruption in a few minutes, despite the fact that 75 percent of organisations admit that the threat of business downtime is likely to increase in 2016. The essential safety net for any organisation is a Business Continuity Plan.

Investing the time and energy in the short-term will benefit your business in the long run.

The message is simple – it’s never too early to take steps to assess your business risks and set the internal recovery procedure.

Make your plan as detailed as your business needs it to be and take the time to communicate this with your team. Regularly review the plan in tune with the changing needs of your company. A well thought out Business Continuity Plan will adapt to any incident or crisis for your company.

Need help with a business continuity plan? We can help.

We have a team of highly experienced consultants that provide support and advice to assist your business write a business continuity plan. We have a full procedure which has been tried, tested and improved so that your business would be able to ensure continued delivery of services to your customers. We ensured that our business continuity plans are practical documents which are designed to be as easy-to-use as possible.

We can also provide a checking service so that you can be sure your business continuity plan is suitable and will be effective.

The Next Step…

If you would like advice and help on writing your business continuity plan, or you would like your plan tested please contact us on 01392 824 022 or email us at info@amesolutions.co.uk.

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