We probably all understand that business operates in a world surrounded by risk and varying surety. Yet most organisations do not make adequate plans for an event that could interrupt, jeopardise or possibly finish the business. It is ironic that the precipitating event will not usually be linked to how effective and successful the business is. This makes the loss of business, or indeed the loss of the business itself, even more tragic.

Lack of planning is bad for any business, but especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).Bigger business may have more than one location, separate networks and funds to mitigate against events, but smaller businesses may well have none of these, and any form of business interruption could prove fatal.

What sort of incidents can bring a business down? These range from large scale incidents in extreme cases like terrorism, fire and floods, to other smaller incidents, which can be just as devastating, such as sabotage, data theft or loss, IT system failure and legal breaches.

The main thrust of Continuity Planning is the Plan itself. The core of this Plan includes planning for the complete recovery and set up of the IT infrastructure, logistics, communication channels and business operations. Put simply, the aim is to minimise disruption and have the entire business up and running as quickly as possible in the event of an interruption.

Creating this plan and a mechanism for ensuring that all employees understand it does not need to be costly. Certainly the cost should be weighed against the loss of losing your entire operation!

The 4 steps we employ are to:
1. Work with you to identify the risks to your business
2. Create a Continuity Plan to limit those risks and what to do if any occur
3. Communicate that Plan to everybody, so that they know what to do and assign responsibilities should an incident occur
4. Test, review and update the plan, continually

The Plan will identify risk areas ,who is in charge of your Plan, all responsible sub-parties, contact details for all involved, logistics, infrastructure resources to be deployed and full IT recovery reestablishing lines of communication.

We also have solutions to hold and deploy this information so that all your employees and partners can enact the Plan in the event of an incident.

Our continuity services are headed by Charles Jenkins who has extensive military, security and IT experience in this field.