News Category: Business Technology
A recent survey by YouGov has found that most owners of small firms are completely unprepared of their company suffered a major business disruption such as a fire, flood for power cuts. The survey found that only one third of firms had a practical action plan to deal with such emergencies. Most of the firms surveyed had never heard of the BES 25999 British standard Business Continuity Management (BCM). By helping to put the fundamentals of a BCM system in place, the standard is designed to keep your business going during the most challenging and unexpected circumstances – protecting your staff, preserving your reputation and providing the ability to continue to operate and trade. The survey also revealed that business to business loyalty was shallow and unforgiving. Failure to retain customers may lead to increased cost of sale and even business debts.
Most major blue chip companies, particularly in financial services where regulatory compliance is concerned, have tried and tested business continuity plans. Information technology business continuity is a key area which blue chips rely on heavily for their employees to work and protect data. Failure of a building IT infrastructure would normally result in staff being moved offsite to a secondary mirrored secure location, where they could carry on with their normal activities. For example a share trading floor may be duplicated at as every minute lost due to systems failure could cost millions of pounds. For smaller firms with businesses that are less critical and timely and that do not rely as heavily on information technology, a business continuity plan is still highly relevant. The survey showed, businesses that fail to recover quickly enough, lose key customers, who become annoyed and do elsewhere. Most business continuity plans are designed and managed by the IT director of large companies. However, a small firm may only have a few employees with limited computer experience. Yet, data is stored within computers may be just as critical to survival of the small firm. When a prospective customer speaks to a firm on the phone and all they get is that “the system has gone down” it reflects extremely badly on the company's reputation and credibility.