As the term implies, business continuity describes your company’s ability to continue doing business—to keep operating—in the face of any disruptions that may arise. Disruptions can be caused by countless adverse incidents: weather events, cyberattacks, supply chain problems, IT outages, and the like. The goal of business continuity (BC) is to identify the most likely disruptive scenarios, create strategic plans to mitigate them, and practice those plans in order to stay prepared.
Business continuity includes:
Business continuity is crucial for ensuring the ongoing viability of your company.
Downtime is your enemy: It not only cuts into your profits, but it damages your reputation. Your customers depend on you to provide your goods or services, and when you’re unable to, you begin to lose their trust and potentially, their business. The longer it takes you to recover from a disruption, the more vulnerable your company becomes.
Business continuity minimizes downtime and protects you from such scenarios. Additionally, it helps you:
More than solving problems, business continuity prevents problems. As mentioned above, disruptions come in many different forms. But no matter what causes them—a fire, a third-party malfunction, a power outage, or anything else—disruptions can create a multitude of issues, namely:
Additionally, a good business continuity plan ensures that you stay in compliance with regulatory and legal requirements, avoiding fines.
First, you have to get the support of leadership so you can allocate resources and designate people to head up and oversee BC efforts throughout your company. Then, your implementation process should include the steps mentioned above:
As important as all these steps are, they’re also complex and can be resource-intensive. Many companies opt to use specialized business continuity software to aid their efforts.
Fusion is a software platform purpose-built to make business continuity much more efficient, intuitive, and integrated across your company. It streamlines every step of your BC efforts and enables you to maintain good oversight of your entire plan. Importantly, it facilitates keeping all the dynamic information about your operations, dependencies, and even third-party vendors up to date.
Download the whitepaper to learn how to gain support from leadership and employees, save time and effort, and improve the agility, effectiveness, and reliability of your program.
Read More
Ensure your company can operate through any disruption. See how Fusion streamlines, manages, and strengthens your business continuity efforts.