While your office was closed for a long weekend, a medium sized earthquake hit the area. The heritage building that housed your office suffered some structural damage and the building was rendered unsafe to enter. Your entire business hangs in the balance. Thankfully you developed a Business Continuity plan, right?
Protect Your Company’s Operations with a Business Continuity Plan
A Business Continuity (BC) plan is a disaster program that a business invokes following a disruptive event. It ensures that the company can maintain service and product delivery at a predetermined, acceptable level. It’s a well thought out contingency plan to keep your systems and services running at a minimal level in order to limit any unnecessary losses after an incident.
A BC plan takes a great deal of discussion and preparedness. You need to determine what the bare minimum level of service that you need to maintain to keep everyone relatively happy and fulfilled. Follow these few steps to begin developing your own BC disaster plan.
Learn more about the specifics of Business & Commercial Insurance in this article: Business & Commercial Insurance & Protecting You and Your Staff
Develop the Minimum Level of Service
During a disruption, you’ll be without the full compliment of staff and resources. If your office suffers a total loss, what are the core services that must run to ensure that there is no disruption of service to your customers? Further, who are the key personnel that are required in order to fulfill these services? Each business is different and will have differing priorities to their customers.
It’s a Team Effort
Your company requires a whole host of employees to operate efficiently, correct? Your disaster plan also needs a core group of employees to take charge of their areas in the event of a disruption. Once you’ve isolated the minimum level of service, identify those people in your organization who are best suited to restore and/or maintain these services. You’ll be asking a lot of them, so pick the leaders in your group who will go the extra mile when called upon. Consider this group the Task Force. Come up with a group name like Raven Team 6 or Delta Banana. Great for team building considering the daunting task that everyone is preparing for.
Move Essential Infrastructure Assets Off-Site
Do your business run internal email servers? Will your entire communications network screech to a halt if the office is lost in a fire or flood? Do you host your eCommerce web store locally at the office? If you host any mission critical, web based application from inside the office, then exploring remote hosting is certainly an important step towards ensuring the continued agility of your company. Off-site data vaults exist for this very purpose. They are designed to withstand earthquake, flood, fire and run 24hour surveillance and security. A very sound investment.
Here’s a wonderfully dramatic video from a UK-Based insurance group that details the needs for a Business Continuity plan in plain terms and great detail.
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Our in-house business insurance team of experts are highly skilled in developing the best possible commercial insurance policies for your organization.
