Business continuity services

Every year, nearly one in five businesses suffers a major interruption. Designing and implementing solid business continuity plans helps organisations prevent these interruptions becoming business critical issues. 

Business continuity management is complementary to a wider risk management framework. It is a holistic management process that identifies, in advance, the potential impacts of a wide variety of disruptions to the organisations ability to function, allowing the organisation to tolerate the loss of part or all of its operation capability.
Control Risks' business continuity consultants can support you throughout the entire business continuity management process:
 

Business Continuity Cycle

 

Business Continuity Scope and Organisation
This is the starting point of any project. Three key areas are considered:

  • The corporate policy on business continuity is agreed and written
  • The scope of the planning effort is defined
  • Roles and responsibilities for project team members are confirmed

Business Impact Analysis
This is the foundation of good business continuity planning. This seeks to identify the organisation's key business processes, people, systems and dependencies as well as the impact their non availability would have on the business.

Risk Assessment
A formal risk assessment examines the full range of dangers to the key business activities identified in the Business Impact Analysis, as well as other core organisational interests. The objective is a prioritised approach to allocating scarce risk mitigation resources.

Develop Strategies
Control Risks works with the business to investigate and develop strategies for recovering business operations, on time and to management-approved levels.  Frequently, there are multiple recovery options available that must be fully explored.  Appropriate strategies can then be adopted and implemented to ensure a robust and repeatable business recovery capacity is in place.

Document Plans
Once appropriate strategies are developed and agreed within the business, they must be clearly documented in a format that is accessible to all personnel with responsibilities under the plan.   These resources must include activation criteria, clear lines of escalation, communications protocols and other important information.

Implement and Awareness
Successful implementation of business continuity plans is vital to the entire planning process. Staff with specific roles and responsibilities in the plans need to know what is expected of them if the plans are invoked and trained accordingly. Wider awareness of the plans must be made across the organisation as all staff need to know what plans are in place to protect the organisation, should an interruption occur.
Exercise
Once the programme of awareness is complete the exercising of management teams who have roles and responsibilities during any invocation of the plans is critical to ensure they are comfortable with the plans.

Review and maintain
Business Continuity plans are living documents and as such, they need to be periodically reviewed and maintained to ensure that the information is correct and up to date.