Unfortunately for modern businesses, it isn’t just ‘acts of God’ that you have to be prepared for. Business resilience means preparing for natural disasters and burst pipes, but also technological and operational issues. Putting plans in place to withstand and recover from unexpected disruptions is all-encompassing, and a necessary process for organisations of all sizes.

This is the fundamental goal of business continuity management (BCM): identifying potential threats to an organisation, and the impact those threats would have on business operations if they came to pass. It provides a framework for building resilience, and the capability to respond in a way that safeguards your stakeholders, your reputation, and your brand.

What is business continuity?

Business continuity is the capability of an organisation to continue delivering products or services at a pre-defined level following a disruptive incident. While disaster recovery is often focused on the technical restoration of your IT systems and data, business continuity takes a broader view of your whole organisation. It encompasses the people, the processes, the physical workspace, and the communication channels that allow your business to function.

At its core, business continuity is about ensuring that the most critical functions of a business keep running during a crisis. For example, if a London law firm lost access to its primary office due to power outage, business continuity would allow its solicitors to continue accessing case files and communicating with clients from an alternative location. It’s the difference between completely stopping business activity, and continuing in an altered but managed way.

What is business continuity planning?

Business continuity planning is the process of creating a system to prevent disasters, and to recover from disasters if they occur. The plan ensures that your staff and assets are protected from disruption, and are able to continue working quickly in the event of a disaster.

A business continuity plan takes the form of a roadmap that outlines exactly how an organisation will respond to specific, plausible scenarios. A robust business continuity plan will be regularly reviewed and updated as threats evolve and scenarios are tested, ensuring that staff are trained and plans are adjusted to ensure they can be successfully implemented.

A thorough plan will start with a business impact analysis. This should identify your most critical business activities, and the resources you need to support them. You might find yourself asking questions you had never considered during this process, such as how long your business can survive without emails, or how long you can continue operating normally without a particular department. Quantifying these risks allows you to prioritise your investment, highlighting and addressing any single points of failure within your infrastructure.

The planning process also involves establishing clear roles and responsibilities. A lack of clarity around people’s responsibilities and actions during a crisis can exacerbate the issue, and prolong downtime. A business continuity plan will define who has the authority to declare a disaster, who is responsible for communicating with staff and clients, and who will lead the technical recovery efforts, ensuring that the response is as measured and efficient as possible.

The benefits of business continuity planning

The most obvious benefit of business continuity planning is protecting your bottom line. Research consistently shows that businesses without a clear recovery plan are significantly more likely to go under following a major disruption. It’s an obvious point, but the less time it takes to get back on your feet, the lower the financial impact, and the less chance there is of insolvency. The more availability matters to your clients and within your industry, the more this effect is amplified, affecting your reputation and ability to win contracts.

Beyond just surviving, a robust continuity plan can have a present-day impact on your reputation. A range of stakeholders are increasingly conscious of the resilience of companies they work with, from clients and investors to insurance providers. Being able to demonstrate a certified business continuity strategy (such as one aligned with ISO 22301 or 27001) sends a powerful signal to your partners, and helps to increase trust.

Cyber resilience is also increasingly important. As we’ve discussed previously, the rise of AI-driven cyber threats and ransomware means that a breach could be a matter of when, rather than if. Business continuity planning means that even if a cybercriminal successfully encrypts your primary data, for instance, you will have a verified and immutable backup to restore from. At Sota, we integrate our SotaProtect services directly into our clients’ continuity plans, ensuring that detection, response, and recovery are all seamless.

Finally, the process of planning itself can reveal hidden inefficiencies within your business. The process of analysing every critical process can help to identify redundant systems, or overly complex workflows that could be streamlined. In this way, business continuity planning helps to reinforce your business against short and long-term issues, making it more efficient and agile during your daily operations.

How to create a business continuity plan

Creating an effective business continuity plan is, unsurprisingly, a structured process. As responding to a disaster requires the involvement of everyone within an organisation, so does creating a business continuity plan, with input needed from every level.

The first step is to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment. This isn’t dissimilar to a health and safety risk assessment that you may already have conducted, but the focus here is on more structural issues. It should identify all potential threats, from localised issues like a burst water pipe or a power cut, to large-scale events like a global pandemic or a sophisticated cyberattack. For each threat, you’ll need to assess the likelihood of it occurring, and the potential severity of the impact. This allows your organisation to focus its resources on the most probable and damaging scenarios.

The second step is a business impact analysis. This is where the business should identify its most critical functions, and how long recovery should take for each. This will vary from company to company, with the ability to access files being a priority for one, and the ability to process payments being more important for another. The analysis should also consider dependencies between departments and software, such as whether the sales team can function if your CRM system goes offline.

Once the priorities have been established, you can start to develop recovery strategies. This is where technical solutions and physical infrastructure come into play. Our SotaCloud platform for instance provides secure, off-site hosting that can be activated if on-site servers fail. We also offer unique workplace recovery suites at our Kent Science Park campus, providing fully equipped office spaces including desks, computers, and telephony. This allows your key staff to resume work quickly if your primary office is inaccessible.

The fourth step is the most dreaded one: documentation. This should take the form of a clear, concise guide that outlines the immediate actions to be taken following a disruption. It should include contact lists for all staff and key suppliers, as well as location details for alternative workspaces, and step-by-step instructions for restoring critical IT systems. It’s also vital to include a communication plan that outlines how you will keep your clients informed during the recovery process.

The final and most important step is testing and maintenance. A plan that has never been tested isn’t much of a plan at all. Regular testing can take the form of walking through a hypothetical disaster scenario, and seeing if any gaps in your strategy emerge. At a more advanced level, it may be possible to simulate the process, and you may even wish to run periodic drills. This doesn’t just keep you prepared, but also helps to keep your plan updated as the business grows and the threat landscape changes.

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The current business landscape is nothing if not unpredictable. Business continuity management is an insurance policy against this, building a culture of resilience that permeates the business, and ensures you’re never blindsided by an emergency. By investing in a comprehensive plan, supported by independent infrastructure and expert consultancy, you’re not just protecting your staff and clients, but also your brand.

Sota has the expertise and the physical facilities to implement a comprehensive business continuity plan. Our three decades of experience in business continuity management and status as an independent network operator make us the ideal partner for improving resilience. Whether you need to secure your data against the latest threats, or ensure your team has a place to work in an emergency, we’re here to provide the guidance and support you need. Visit our Disaster Recovery page to learn more, or get in touch with us today.