What’s a Disaster?
Most people think of a disaster as the result of a fire, explosion, flood or act of terrorism. These constitute less than 5% of the causes of business disaster.
Catastrophic IT failure causes more than 40% of all significant outages; sadly a business that loses access to its data for more than 10 days is unlikely to fully recover. Denial of access to premises and telecoms failure are also significant causes.
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New Auditing Regulations
New auditing regulations require a statement about the viability of your business from June - and that includes its ability to withstand a disaster. So, if its not capable and your auditors reports filter into the public domain, it’ll be in black & white for customers, creditors, business prospects and competitors to see.
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Laws Regulations & Compliance
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Director's Liability legislation |
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'Due Diligence' |
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Corporate Governance |
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New auditing standards
(from June 2007) |
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Customer contracts |
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Government supply clauses |
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Trade Association/Body regulations (e.g. The Law Society) |
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Insurance requirements |
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Tax VAT & HR records |
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Data Protection laws & FSA |
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Tender specifications |
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New Business potential |
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The We’ll work from home
and ‘get by’ fallacy
Sadly most companies that try to ‘muddle through’ don’t. They find out too late that vital information held on computers and critical systems aren’t available to them.
Then they attempt to manage their communications – a very small business switchboard can handle the equivalent of hundreds of calls per hour at peak times. The delusion that they can manage it via home phones and mobiles crashes.
Whilst they’re frantically taking messages and calling each other on mobiles, productivity is diving, communications are dragging and customers are giving up at the ‘busy tone’. Email, meanwhile, is bouncing off a dead mail server.... as if they’d already gone out of business. Most of them will within 18 months.
If you still believe in this fallacy, run a test. Don’t warn anyone – just pull the plug on all your PCs servers and telephone system at 9am – and see if you can make it through a day.
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Wrong
In today’s commercial environment Business Continuity provision is essential for all enterprises. Not some woolly back of an envelope idea, but a properly constructed plan: one that will both work and stand the scrutiny of your suppliers, customers, investors, insurers and auditors.
Without this you could be in deep trouble. Not only is there a high probability that your business could go under in a disaster (90% of businesses without provision fail to survive), but there’s a significant probability that you could be sued. If you’re a Director and you haven’t exercised ‘due diligence’ in making provision, you may be liable under ‘Directors Liabilities’ legislation.
Furthermore if any of your customers contracts requires you to take ‘reasonable precautions’ to ensure you can supply them their goods and services and you haven’t, you’re in breach of contract. And your business? Where’s that going to go?
Happily, there's a healthy alternative
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