What is Business Continuity

Business Continuity, also often referred to as Disaster Recovery, is the process of keeping your business running in the event of the loss of some part (or all) of the business infrastructure and staff.

Many companies are required by their bank, their clients or their investors to have a business continuity plan. It can be very daunting to create one, and knowing where to start is the key.

First of all, it is imperative to know where your business critical information is stored, and I don't just mean your computer data. This could include cheque books, bank cards, patent documentation... The key to any business recovery system is knowing where that information is, how much can be replicated given time, and what your business would fail without.

You can never plan for all eventualities. If disasters were planned, we could plan not to be there, but life doesn't work that way, so I recommend not listing problems and responses, but practical solutions that can be applied, that can be tested in advance, and when a problem happens, it becomes a matter of choosing the right solution given the known circumstances.

So what do you need to know in order to create a list of solutions?

Creating solutions

Cost vs Loss

If a solution costs more to implement that you are likely to lose (and remember we are talking profit, not revenue), then it is the wrong solution. It is very important to make a realistic assessment of how much money you will really lose for a given period. It is likely to escalate the longer you are out of action. If you are only incommunicado for a hour, you may lose no business at all, as your clients may simply phone back later. Many people overreact in the face of a problem and money is often wasted on resolving a problem that doesn't really exist.

Timeline

For any given problem there will be a time scale to resolution. A local power cut may take a day to resolve, but a fire in your building will take much longer before you can move back in. So you need to decide how long your business can survive before you implement your first solution. You need to balance the potential loss of business against the cost (and time) of implementing the solution. Obviously if you cannot get access to your building because the road has been closed off due to an incident, you don't go straight out and hire alternative premises as by the time you have them it may all be over. However, diverting the phones to a mobile should only take a few minutes, cost nothing, and is easily cancelled.

The key is knowing (or finding out) the likely duration of the problem. In the simplest of terms knowing that the problem will take minutes, hours, days, weeks or months to fix will allow you to make an informed decision as to which solutions (and there will be more than one) to implement.