What is Business Continuity Planning?

Business Continuity Planning is the management process that provides a framework to ensure the resilience of your business to any eventuality and the ability to recover from any disruptions. Business Continuity Planning helps ensure continuity of service to your key customers and the protection of your reputation and brand.

Business continuity provides a basis for planning to ensure your long-term survivability following a disruptive event. The Plans need to be clear, concise and tailored to the needs of the business. Business Continuity should become part of the way you perform business. It is better to plan for incidents, which may affect your business, rather than having to "catch up" when a problem occurs.

Why have a Business Continuity Plan?

 

• Many businesses that have a major loss and do not have a plan fail to fully recover, or at worst, cease trading
• Many customers will not do business with a supplier who cannot demonstrate continuity of supply
• Most insurers now insist on business continuity planning
• Corporate governance and other legislative requirements demand companies take positive actions.

What is BS 25999?

BS 25999 is a standard which identifies the process, principles and terminology of business continuity planning, providing a basis for understanding, developing and implementing Business Continuity Management within an organisation to provide confidence in business-to-business and business-to-customer dealings.

The British Standard sets out the six elements to the Business Continuity Management process:

1. Business Continuity Management - enables the business continuity capability to be both established (if necessary) and maintained in a manner appropriate to the size and complexity of the organisation.
2. Understanding the organisation - The activities associated with "Understanding the organisation" provide information that enables prioritisation of an organisation's products and services, identification of critical supporting activities and the resources that are required to deliver them.
3. Determining business continuity strategies - This allows an appropriate response to be chosen for each product or service, such that the organisation can continue to deliver those products and services at the time of disruption.
4. Developing and implementing a BCM response - This involves developing incident management, business continuity and business recovery plans that detail the steps to be taken during and after an incident to maintain or restore operations.
5. BCM exercising, maintaining and reviewing BCM arrangements - This leads to the organisation being able to demonstrate the extent to which its strategies and plans are complete, current and accurate and identify opportunities for improvement.
6. Embedding BCM in the organisation's culture - This enables BCM to become part of the organisation's core values and instills confidence in all stakeholders in the ability of the organisation to cope with disruptions.

Is Business Continuity Management workable?

Business Continuity Plans should not be considered completely reliable until they have been tested and have been shown to be workable. This testing should involve the validation of plans, rehearsing with key staff and testing systems which are relied upon to deliver resilience (such as IT (Information Technology) systems).

Not only should these plans be put into place, but they should be kept up to date and regularly reviewed. Particular attention should be paid to any change of staff and the business structure, changes in the businesses functions and/or services, details of suppliers and alterations in the strategic objectives of the business.

How can Castle Grove help?

At Castle Grove Insurance Services Ltd we have developed key relationships with specially selected partners who we feel offer services that compliment ours and offer our customers and potential customers real value in the running of their business. Please contact us for further details of the business continuity planning service we can offer through our chosen partner, Blackmores.