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What is Business Continuity and why is it important for your business?

Posted Aug 30, 2022

What is Business Continuity and Why is it Important for Your Business CMAC

What is meant by business continuity?

Business continuity is a company or organisation’s ability to retain and maintain essential business functions during a disaster, as well as how well it can recover from the situation. By ensuring that there are sufficient business continuity resources in place, an organisation can prevent serious interruptions to mission-critical operations and services.

What is the main purpose of business continuity?

Business continuity helps organisations to maintain resilience, ensuring that you can react and adapt to situations and interruptions to your business. By implementing strong business continuity, a company can avoid financial losses, as well as save time and its reputation. This means that your business, employees and customers will all benefit from ensuring you’re operating with the support of business continuity in place.

What are the characteristics of business continuity?

With business continuity, organisations can proactively ensure that essential operations can proceed as normal during disruptions.

Business continuity includes different levels of response — some mission-critical while others are low-priority — to ensure that the most important functions and services are restored first to minimise the impact on your organisation. With business continuity in place, every employee of the business should know how to move forward with operations in an emergency, with a clear hierarchy structure and ways of working already in place.

Pre-planning and preparedness are crucial to establishing business continuity, as it provides organisations with the head start they need to protect themselves against disasters and restore operations when the unexpected should happen.

Why is business continuity important?

Businesses need to prevent unwanted downtime to ensure that critical functions and services aren’t affected. Threats to an organisation can range from malicious cyber attacks to unforeseen and extreme weather events.

Without business continuity, an organisation will need to try and recover without any preparation in place. Communication will break down as employees of all levels will scramble to try and restore order, while no one will know who to report to or what actions need to take place.

It’s not just about how your business deals with an incident, but how quickly you can get things up and running again for your customers and clients. Any suppliers or external stakeholders that your organisation works closely with will also suffer the consequences of business disruptions, meaning your reputation is at risk too.

How do you ensure business continuity?

The first step to ensure your business is prepared for the unexpected is to take an in-depth look at your organisation to identify and analyze areas of weakness that could be exploited in a disaster.

Do you have sufficient IT security?

Could you establish a line of communication in a power outage?

Would adverse weather conditions affect deliveries?

Once you’ve identified potential weaknesses, you can allocate your available budget towards business continuity to ensure you can establish safeguards that allow your business to continue running its mission-critical functions.

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan is a document used by organisations to outline procedures that businesses will follow during unplanned, emergency disruptions. This comprehensive document covers a wide range of contingency plans to ensure that all areas of your business are covered in an emergency; including business processes, assets, human resources and business partners.

You can learn more in our comprehensive guide on how to write a business continuity plan.

Ensure resilience in your business

Business continuity is the key to preparing your business for any situation and ensuring that you have the tools you need if the worst should happen.

CMAC specialises in providing emergency support to businesses, with business continuity management being just one of their award-winning solutions.With a team of experts working round the clock, 365 days a year, CMAC delivers peace of mind to businesses that a solution is only a phone call away when disaster strikes.

Learn more about CMAC’s full suite of industry-leading recovery solutions, from ground transport to emergency accommodation.

Other useful guides

How to make sure your employees get home safely in a crisis | CMAC Group

Post-pandemic — Is Remote Working the New Home for Business Continuity | CMAC Group


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