What is Business Continuity Planning and Management?
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a continual process that helps organisations prepare for, prevent (where possible), respond to and recover from disruptions or incidents, regardless of the nature / size of the disruption, or the type of impacts they may have. The risks of disruption could be from the external environment (eg, severe weather or power cuts) or the internal environment (eg, loss of key staff or ICT / systems outage). No range of risks identified could ever be totally exhaustive as there are so many permutations of scenarios, but the range of impacts on your business or organisation will be much easier to identify as they will be more limited.
BCM is about maintaining the essential business deliverables of your business or organisation in the event of a disruption or emergency, and mitigating the impacts of that disruption on your business or organisation. Without effective business planning, service disruption could result in:-
- A complete failure of your business or organisation;
- Loss of income;
- Loss of reputation and / or loss of customers;
- Financial, legal and regulatory penalties;
- Human Resources issues;
- An impact on insurance premiums.
Adopting the approach of dealing with the crisis on the day may fail to deliver a response that will save your business or organisation, and advance planning is necessary for the best outcome. It provides a planned response - combined with effective measures to reduce interruption and minimise losses. Such measures will include systems for identifying and co-ordinating the actions of staff required to respond to and recover from a service disruption. However, the process is not a quick-fix or one-day job but needs time and commitment devoted to it and it needs ownership at the senior management level.
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"I am often asked what single piece of advice I can recommend that would be most helpful to the business continuity. My answer is a simple, but effective, business continuity plan that is regularly reviewed and tested."
Extract of speech by Eliza Manningham-Buller, former Director-General of MI5, to the UK CBI Conference, Nov 04. |
Thanks to Sunderland City Council for material for this page.
Last Modified:
01/02/2008 14:24:37
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