Business Continuity Management (BCM)

Business Continuity Management is the process of planning for and dealing with potential threats and hazards to your organisation’s ability to maintain services.

Every organisation will experience disruption at some point. Whether it is a cyber attack, severe weather, loss of utilities, supplier failure, staff shortages or a problem with premises, being able to continue your most important activities is critical.

Business Continuity Management helps organisations understand what is essential, prepare for disruption, respond effectively when incidents occur and recover more quickly afterwards.

A simple business continuity plan can make the difference between a temporary setback and a major impact on your organisation, customers, staff, service users and reputation.

Why business continuity matters

A business continuity plan can help you:

  • Continue supporting customers, clients or service users during disruption.
  • Reduce financial losses and operational impacts.
  • Protect your reputation and stakeholder confidence.
  • Meet contractual, regulatory, funding or insurance expectations.
  • Support staff by giving clear roles, responsibilities and decision-making arrangements.
  • Recover faster and more effectively after an incident.
  • Demonstrate resilience to customers, partners, commissioners and funders.

What could disrupt your organisation?

Business continuity planning starts by understanding what could stop or seriously affect your ability to deliver your most important activities. Disruption can come from many sources, including people, premises, technology and suppliers.

People

Premises

Technology and information

Suppliers and partners

Staff shortages

Fire

Cyber attack

Supplier failure

Loss of key skills

Flooding

IT outage

Transport disruption

Industrial action

Building closure

Data loss

Utility failure

Illness or absence

Access restrictions

Telephony failure

Contractor unavailability

Examples of disruption

Examples of disruption that could affect businesses, voluntary organisations and community groups include:

  • Severe weather affecting travel, access to premises or the availability of staff.
  • Cyber attacks causing loss of access to systems, records, email or data.
  • Utility failures affecting buildings, communications, refrigeration, lighting or safety systems.
  • Supply chain disruption delaying essential goods, equipment or services.
  • Significant staff absence affecting your ability to deliver key activities.
  • Loss of premises due to fire, flooding, structural problems or safety concerns.

Keep your plan proportionate. A small organisation may only need a short, practical plan with key contacts, critical activities, priorities, workarounds and recovery steps. The most important thing is that people know what to do when disruption happens.

How resilient is your organisation?

Download and complete the following checklist. If you answer “No” or “Not sure” to any of these questions, it may be a useful area to review.

Getting started is easier than you may think

You do not need a large or complicated document to improve your resilience. Start by answering a few practical questions:

  1. What are our most important products, services or activities?
  2. How long could we manage without them before serious impacts occur?
  3. What people, premises, systems, suppliers, equipment and information do they depend on?
  4. What temporary workarounds could we use if those dependencies were unavailable?
  5. Who would make decisions, communicate updates and coordinate the response during an incident?

Need help?

Guidance, templates and case studies about business continuity can be found on the Suffolk Resilience Forum and on this business continuity advice page.

Gov.uk have created information which can be found on the Business Continuity Management Toolkit.

Whether you are a small business, charity, community group or larger organisation, support is available to help you improve your resilience and develop a proportionate business continuity plan.

The Business Continuity Team can provide advice, templates and guidance to help you get started.

If you require additional support please contact the Business Continuity Manager via email Business.Continuity@suffolk.gov.uk