The effects of COVID-19 on businesses around the world has been sizeable and, in some cases, catastrophic. For those businesses that have survived the storm, this should serve as a stark warning to ensure Business Continuity Planning is placed at the top of the agenda when looking at priorities as they move through the planning process for 2021 funding.
Consider the following
- Do you know what the critical parts of your organisation are?
- How will you protect them if an incident occurs that would threaten their availability?
- How often do you review your plan and is everyone familiar with it?
Too often, businesses deprioritise or overlook this important area. Once a Business Continuity Plan is drafted, it is expected that a Disaster Recovery plan should also be produced to ensure that IT systems and services can be returned to some form of operation in a timely fashion.
A survey by Nationwide Insurance (US) in 2017 revealed that out of 502 small businesses surveyed:
- 68% don’t have a written disaster recovery plan
- 49% expected it to take them 3 months to recover from a natural disaster
- 21% said that disaster recovery planning was not a priority at this time.
Without the necessary plans, how can you expect your business to know how to operate during a business continuity event and indeed, what even constitutes such an event? If you need to trigger mass working from home again in the near future, how will action this, how will you ensure it works well and importantly, how will you manage your remote work force, ensuring you get the best out of them when they could be feeling isolated and vulnerable?
Technology can help to solve these problems, but as with many other aspects of business its important to ensure cross-business buy-in and not deal with these issues in any single function.
If you would like support in creating and / or testing your Business Continuity Plan, we are here to help.
Why you might need support
- Lack of clear ownership, roles and responsibilities – are you clear who is responsible for what areas of business continuity within your organisation?
- Does everyone know the plan and what to do in a BC event?
- Untested or unproven recovery solutions - when was the list time you tested your BC plan?
How we can help
- Removal of silo’s and whole of business support by building a cross-functional team to deliver and operate the programme.
- A clear plan that can be communicated to all those in the business
- Scenario testing to ensure the plan is robust and stands up the challenges your business may face.
Key Deliverables
- Roles and Responsibilities Matrix
- Key Contacts within and outside of your business
- Plan holders and communication strategy
- Action Plans for each scenario in scope linking to procedural steps
- Procedural steps for each item in scope
- Disaster Recovery Plan