Protect your business
If you own, or are responsible for, a business or organisation, have you considered the impact of an emergency on your business?
How would your organisation cope with: -
- A sudden and significant reduction in staff?
- Denial of access to your building, one of your sites or a whole geographical area?
- Unexpected loss of mains electricity, gas or water?
- Significant disruption to transport?
- Disruption to the availability of fuel?
- Loss of telecommunications or internet?
- Loss or disruption to your computer systems?
- Disruption which affects your key suppliers or partners? What if they go into liquidation?
"Business Continuity is the processes, procedures and plans you put in place to help cope with the impact of an emergency on your business."
Definition of Business Continuity
Business continuity refers to the ability of an organisation to maintain or quickly restore its essential functions, operations, and services during and after a disruption. It involves proactive planning, risk management, and recovery strategies to minimize downtime and ensure resilience against unexpected events such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, pandemics, or supply chain failures.
Purpose of Business Continuity
- Minimises disruption – Ensures critical services continue operating.
- Protects reputation – Maintains public trust and stakeholder confidence.
- Reduces financial impact – Prevents excessive revenue loss and operational costs.
- Ensures legal and regulatory compliance – Meets industry-specific standards and obligations.
Business continuity is essential for resilience in both public and private sectors, including emergency services, local authorities, and businesses
Key Elements of Business Continuity Management
- Risk Assessment – Identifying potential threats and their impact on operations.
- Business Continuity Plan (BCP) – A documented strategy outlining how an organisation will continue operations during a disruption.
- Incident Response & Crisis Management – Procedures for handling immediate threats effectively.
- Disaster Recovery – Strategies for restoring IT systems and infrastructure.
- Training & Testing – Regular exercises and simulations to ensure preparedness.
- Communication Strategy – Clear communication plans for staff, customers, and stakeholders during a crisis.
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is the process of planning to ensure that your business can return back to normal as quickly and easily as possible in the event of an emergency. BCM is simpler than you might think…we’re going to run through a few simple steps, for more detailed information see the Business Continuity Plan in the downloads area.
Did you know…
…80% of businesses affected by a major incident close within 18 months.
…90% of businesses that have business continuity arrangements in place at the time of an incident suffer least.
Whether you are a large ‘corporate’ business or an SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise) the ability to respond swiftly and effectively to an emergency has never been more important….why wait for something to happen?
Emergencies can happen anywhere at any time. Even a small disruption such as a power cut can affect normal operation of an organisation. Risks could be from an external source such as those identified in the Essex Community Risk Register like severe weather or from within your organisation such as loss of key staff.
Over the years, threats to businesses have changed, and will continue to do so. It is your responsibility as a business to consider these risks and put in place a plan to help mitigate them.
How do I get started......
STEP 1 - Assess the Risks to your Service Delivery
Organisational risks may include:
- Loss of information technology and communications systems (equipment failure or cyber-attack)
- Loss of premises (fire, power loss, water loss, flooding, severe weather, equipment failure, denial of access to the building)
- Loss of data (ICT outage or cyber security incident)
- Loss of staff (flu pandemic, severe weather, health & safety incident)
- Loss of supply chain (failure of a vital supplier or service provider)
STEP 2 - Get Suitable Insurance
Make sure your business is covered by suitable insurance; The Association of British Insurers (ABI) has useful information on choosing the right insurance for your business.
STEP 3 - Understand your organisation
Identify and summarise the activities delivered by your organisation, define their level of operational criticality. You could do this by department.
Think about these questions:
- How long could my organisation tolerate not being able to deliver each activity? This is referred to as the Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption MTPD.
- How do the activities interlink? What are the team/activity inter-dependencies?
- What is the impact if the activity is not delivered?
- What resources are needed to deliver the activity? (people, equipment, IT systems, facilities)
- What are the external dependencies? (suppliers, utilities, services etc)
- Review the business continuity plans for your key suppliers.
- Identify key points about this activity, for example is it delivered at any particular time of the year or month?
STEP 4 - Design your BC Plans
Once you have understood your business and its vulnerabilities and identified your critical activities, you need to consider some ways to protect your service delivery.
Your plan could consider the following:
- Are there alternative ways of delivering your critical activities? You could consider investment in the resilience of any activities that you consider vital, of course balancing this against risk, impact and cost.
- Prepare an emergency communications plan. Consider, how can you contact your staff out of hours and advise them what to do? How can you contact your customers and suppliers?
- Develop how to guides for key activities so other team members can step in.
- Ensure you have remote access to systems.
- Implement regular data back-ups and safe storage approaches, if necessary, in fireproof cabinets or securely off site.
- Document alternative suppliers for critical services, products or equipment.
STEP 5 - Train your staff
- Do your staff know what to before, during and after an incident?
- Do they consider that being prepared for an emergency is a shared responsibility?
This approach will build your organisations resilience to disruption. Make sure everyone knows where the BC plan is kept and how to access it. Making sure that it is accessible – even in the loss of IT or your premises.
STEP 6 - Implement your Plan
Once you have understood your business and its vulnerabilities, identified your critical activities. You will need to work out the affordable and practical steps that you can take ahead of time to ensure you can operationalise your plan in your emergency.
- Get the buy in of your staff, ensure thay know how important business continuity is.
STEP 7 - Validate and Practice your plans.
How do you know your plans will work? The best way to do this is to test them. Consider a realistic scenario and then work through it with your staff using your plan. Testing will help our team to understand the roles they play in the plans and help you to continuously improve your arrangements to ensure that your business becomes more resilient to emergencies.
Repeat this process regularly to ensure that your plans remain up to date.
Where to get further advice and support....
Cyber Security, Scams & Online Threats
CLICK HERE To be redirected to our Cyber Security Information page
Local authorities
CLICK HERE To be redirected to our Cat 1 Responders - Local Authorities Page
Weather and flooding
- To see the latest weather forecast from The Met Office - CLICK HERE
- For the Environment Agency Floodline - CLICK HERE
- Essex County Council - Check if you’re business is at risk of flooding
New to business continuity, click on the logo's below to get further advice & support from these agencies & orgamisations
