Why have a business continuity plan

What do you do, for example, if your place of business catches fire?

Some hard decisions will have to be made, and made quickly. For instance:

• What do you do with all your staff?
• How do you tell the community/customer that you cannot provide 'business/service as usual'?
• How do you meet important deadlines?

The list of questions grows, and so do the levels of uncertainty and anxiety. Without a Business Continuity Plan you will have to rely on an ad-hoc approach to deal with these, and the many other issues that will present themselves.

The main advantages of a planned response include:

• Identification of critical systems and information in advance of an event, so that an informed decision can be taken on the extent to which such systems should be protected
• Definition of the roles of individual officers
• Determination of the resources required to maintain a minimum level of service to the community/customer.

Do you have a plan?