Business Continuity

Business Continuity Management is an ongoing process of risk assessment and contingency planning with the purpose of ensuring that the business can continue if risks materialise.

"Two out of five companies who experience a disaster go out of business within five years"

Source: Gartner

These risks could be from the external environment (over which you have no control, such as power failure or fire damage) or from within your organisation (such as deliberate or accidental damage to systems). You must be confident that your organisation could continue to deliver its business objectives if things go wrong.

Business continuity is not just concerned with disaster recovery. It addresses anything that could affect the continuity of service over the long term, such as skills requirements, provider lock-in and technology obsolescence.

The Other Stuff can help you formulate and manage your BCM strategy by leading you through the following five stages:

Understanding your business

We analyse your business, identifying mission critical processes and functions, and carry out a risk assessment to identify the threats to these processes.

Formulating a strategy

We assist you to improve organisational resilience to interruption, allowing for the recovery of key business and systems processes within the agreed recovery timeframes, whilst maintaining the organisation's critical functions.

Developing a response

We help you to develop a detailed response to a potential incident and formulate plans that support that response, including actions to be taken at the time of an incident, who is involved and how they are to be contacted.

Training and awareness

Your response team identified above will be trained to ensure that they can effectively respond to a crisis and follow the plan you've implemented. We also ensure that the culture of BCM is embedded in your organisation. All those associated with the organisation need to have confidence in its ability to manage in a crisis.

Testing, maintenance and auditing

A business continuity plan is unreliable until it is tested and has been proven workable. We can help you to implement a testing schedule and manage the tests on your behalf. We will also assist you in ensuring that your plan is kept up to date and provides a relevant solution.