Why your business needs a continuity plan

A comprehensive continuity plan can help address all sorts of threats that can disrupt your business.

Crises can strike at any time. If they do, you don't want your business to grind to a halt. That's where a well-thought-out business continuity plan can make all the difference.

• What is a business continuity plan?
• Why do you need a continuity plan?
• What sort of threats should be planned for?
• How to create your business continuity plan?

What is a business continuity plan?

Business continuity plans detail the processes and procedures that your company will take to continue operations during an emergency. It goes hand-in-hand with your disaster recovery plan which prescribes how the business will recover from different threats.

Business continuity plans are usually developed as part of a company’s overall risk management. Ultimately these plans are about mitigating risk by planning for disasters.

Why do you need a business continuity plan?

With appropriate forethought and planning, your business can pivot quickly, safely, and efficiently to a considered alternative mode of operation. Being prepared means you can safeguard against financial loss, lost productivity, and a damaged reputation.

Many companies are now well prepared to pivot to remote working after the pandemic. We can attest to the fact that businesses that had continuity plans and had prepared for such remote working had a much easier time at the start of the pandemic. their plans allowed them to transition smoothly and calmly to remote work. Those that didn't have a plan needed to expend considerably more time, effort and money to keep their businesses running during lockdown. 

The pandemic was just one such scenario that businesses need to plan for. A suite of business continuity plans covering such eventualities as cyber-attacks, market depressions, natural disasters, power cuts etc should all be prepared for.

Calmly transitioning to fallback ways of doing business not only allows you to keep the lights on, but it gives customers confidence in you, and helps ensure that your staff feel comfortable through various predicaments.

The UK cyber security breaches survey 2023 reported that businesses with document plans covering what to do when business is interrupted were more likely to reduce heir downtime and resulting financial losses.

Another significant result of working out a continuity plan is the opportunity to identify areas for improvement. By considering how the business will access its systems in a crunch, you will likely identify areas where you may need to increase capacity, bandwidth, or source new solutions to solve identified problems.

These are just some of the key benefits that a business continuity plan can bring to your business. This article will delve deeper into its significance and explain how to create one for your company.

What sort of threats should be planned for?

1. Pandemic

As mentioned at the top of this blog, we saw that business who had prepared for pandemic adjusted much more quickly when covid 19 struck and locked down the country. 

Another pandemic could force your employees to work from home again, increasing demand for some services, and reducing demand for others. Moreover, another lockdown could prevent you from distributing your offerings due to supply chain problems.

A pademic business continuity plan can help you ease the journey through these trialling times. Formulating how your team will communicate throughout the period, access your systems and data, and perform business off-site is vital to being prepared.

2. Natural Disaster

Natural disasters are extreme geographic phenomena, including hurricanes, fires, floods, and earthquakes. We may not be prone to many natural disasters in Scotland but with the recent notable changes to the climate and increase in extreme weather events, we can’t be blasé about natural disasters. They’re tricky because they’re hard to predict and can leave disastrous consequences within seconds.

Like global pandemics, they can disrupt your way of working by rendering premises unfit for occupation or by interrupting your supply chain, which is why you need a business continuity plan.

3. Utility outage

Water, gas, electricity, and even internet shutoffs and loss of communication lines hinder or halt your operations. In these scenarios you need to know when you make the call to shut the door and send staff home, and how you can keep operations going during extended outages. 

Without a continuity plan, the risk of asset damage and productivity loss is drastically higher.

4. Cyber attack

Cyberattacks are becoming more and more prevalent and therefore more likely to affect your business in some way. The most common examples include data theft, ransomware, distributed denial of service, and SQL injections.

In the best-case scenario, your infrastructure will function less efficiently until you resolve the issue. But in the worst-case scenario, you could lose access to all business data. 

Establishing how you keep operations going during any of these attacks is of vital importance as, without IT most businesses simply can't operate today.

How to create your business continuity plan

Developing a robust continuity plan requires a systematic approach to work through the various considerations. Document each as you follow these steps to craft a solid plan:

1. Build an emergency preparedness team

Choose several cross-functional managers and anyone else who can contribute to the plan, such as your IT service provider. You should include representatives from all essential business functions, like public relations, human resources, and operations.

Determine the emergency response leader and make it clear they’re in charge of moving things forward when disaster strikes.

2. Conduct a risk assessment and business impact analysis

Identify, research, and analyse your potential threats thoroughly. Discuss them with your team and see what would happen if you had to reduce, eliminate, or modify certain services.

Since your company is unique, you’ll need to create a plan according to your specific priorities. Determine the most important processes for your business and figure out how to back them up with recovery strategies.

Make sure to document all issues along the way.

3. Focus on customer service

Your clients need empathy and transparency during crises. The only way to meet their expectations in such trying times is to ensure your customer support team understands your continuity plan.

If necessary, hire more people to answer client inquiries.

4. Identify critical business functions

Your plan should incorporate critical business functions. These include business risk, impact on customers and employees, emergency policy creation, community partners or external organisations, and financial resources during disasters.

This is vital to ensure business operations are functioning ASAP.

5. Train staff and continually improve

Share your continuity plan with your staff and promote a proactive approach through trial runs to verify the plan works. By rehearsing your plans, you can pinpoint any weaknesses or missing aspects. Then, based on your findings and feedback you can refine your plans.

Following this approach doesn’t leave much room for error.

Besides helping you maintain business operations and the supply chain, it also builds customer confidence. If your response to emergencies is effective, your customers will appreciate it.

Rather than risking your company’s future, proactively develop a comprehensive business continuity plan before any crises occur. Ensure that all team members are aligned with the strategy, enabling your business to emerge more resilient and robust from any challenging situation.

Next Steps...

If you need more insights into developing a continuity plan, get in touch with us today. Let’s set up a 10-15-minute chat to determine your goals and how to achieve them.