Business Continuity

Imagine the scenario ... It is 5.00am on Monday morning and you have just been called by the Police to say your warehouse is on fire. Thankfully there are no casualties. 

You are now facing a situation where you have lost all your stock, your staff have nowhere to go, you have lost your IT, you have no phones and Christmas is in two weeks. Do you know what to do next?

It is now 9.00am and your mobile has been ringing constantly; staff want to know where they should go, customers want to know how orders will be fulfilled in time for Christmas and are threatening to go elsewhere, shareholders are concerned about lost revenue and reputation. Will the company make it through to the new year?

This is not a situation you want to find yourself in, but unfortunately the unexpected does happen and you need to know that the business can recover its critical activities quickly and effectively. This is where business continuity comes in. Taken literally this is maintaining continuity of business during any disruptive event that could ultimately have financial and reputational repercussions for the organisation.

What is business continuity?
Business continuity management has now become an accepted discipline that ensures organisations, when faced with an unexpected incident or loss of resource, will continue to be able to maintain their critical activities and manage the effective recovery of their business and services, thus ensuring that impacts remain within pre-defined acceptable limits.

Whilst it is important to define a post incident plan of action, the real benefit of undergoing a business continuity process is identifying the actions that need to be taken pre-incident to ensure that an event simply becomes a manageable incident, not a crisis or disaster. An incident management team will be more confident and in control when they know that they have a selection of proven recovery strategies to choose from to help them respond and recover.

A focus upon business continuity will also help identify actions and risk mitigation measures that will boost organisational resilience and help ensure that many disruptions are actually avoided altogether. It is amazing how many single points of failure and key dependencies are not wholly appreciated until an organisation undergoes the risk and impact analysis elements of their business continuity project. It is not unusual to find back up tapes stored in the same room as the main server or a single phone switch supporting an entire organisation. If these were lost in a fire, how would you recover your data and communicate with staff and customers.

Teed work with our clients to ensure that they can take full advantage of this essential business discipline whilst using methods that are simple but effective, identifying recovery strategies that are appropriate but inexpensive and taking full advantage of the lessons learned during projects managed on behalf of numerous similar organisations.