Assess your risk
Before you can develop an effective continuity plan, you need to understand where your organisation is vulnerable. This section will help you to determine the risks to your business.
A disaster can strike any organisation, large or small. It can arrive in the shape of storm, flood, fire, a terrorist bomb, action by pressure groups, or product contamination.
Around half of all businesses experiencing a disaster with no effective plans for recovery fail within the following 12 months.
A basic plan is essential and the scale of this strategy will be related to the size of your business. There is no universal solution, however all organisations, big and small, will need to go through the same basic process to produce a plan.
Assess your present position
Before making any plan it is sensible to review your loss prevention and recovery measures to asses if you can make any improvements. Here are the key areas to consider:
- Security – are you at risk from crime, vandalism or terror attacks?
- Fire – where are your fire hazards?
- Flooding – is your business at risk from flash or river floods?
- Computers and IT – are your computers safe from hacking, viruses and theft?
- Insurance – does your insurance match your risks?
Next steps: Prepare your business
Now you have an idea of what incidents you need to be aware of, the next stage is to start building a tailor-made plan for your organisation. The process has been broken up into five simple steps.
- Do the online risk assessment
- Download and complete the risk assessment form PDF
- Create your business continuity plan
- Communicate your plan
- Test your plan
Need more inspiration? Take a look at these case studies to see how a business continuity plan has allowed organisations to survive major disruptions.
