Understanding Business Continuity Management: Protecting Your Organisation
NIG has highlighted the importance of Business Continuity Management (BCM), and we’ve adapted their insights to help you understand how to protect your business from internal and external threats.
What is Business Continuity Management?
Business Continuity Management is a holistic approach that identifies potential impacts that could threaten an organisation and develops strategies to maintain operations. It builds resilience and ensures the company can respond effectively to disruptions while safeguarding its reputation, brand, and key stakeholders.
While financial losses can often be calculated, the reputational damage and loss of trust caused by disruptions can have an even greater long-term impact. BCM goes beyond traditional health and safety measures, focusing on risks to the business itself and its ability to continue delivering services.
Why It Matters
Many organisations assume disasters won’t happen to them or that insurance alone will cover the losses. However, recent events, such as the global pandemic, demonstrate that preparation is critical. Even incidents that go unreported can devastate a company’s ability to function. Consider these statistics:
43% of businesses experiencing a disaster never recover.
53% of organisations have no form of business continuity plan.
90% of businesses that lose critical data are forced to close within two weeks.
80% of businesses without a recovery plan shut down within a year after a fire or flood.
For context, even with business interruption insurance, you cannot rely solely on coverage to protect your operations. Learn more about business interruption insurance here.
Building a BCM Strategy
A successful BCM strategy starts with understanding your business vulnerabilities. Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to determine which processes, people, and systems are essential for survival. This assessment helps prioritise resources and identify where to focus continuity planning.
Once the BIA is complete, create a continuity plan that is clear, simple, and actionable. Assign responsibilities, include deputies, and ensure instructions can be followed under pressure. Remember, no plan can cover every scenario, but preparing for worst-case situations ensures you can respond effectively to smaller incidents as well.
Embedding BCM into Your Organisation
Business continuity planning must be part of your organisation’s policies and procedures. Senior management should take responsibility for embedding BCM into corporate culture and decision-making. A robust plan is continuously updated, rehearsed, and tested, just like a fire drill, to ensure it works in practice.
Include input from external experts such as emergency services, neighbouring businesses, utility companies, suppliers, and insurers. Testing your plan through exercises, scenario walkthroughs, or cascading communications will help identify gaps and improve readiness.
Monitoring, Reviewing, and Learning
Monitoring and reviewing performance is a vital step. Regular audits, both internal and external, help identify areas for improvement and measure the effectiveness of your continuity strategies. Learn from past incidents, successes, and mistakes to continuously refine your plan.
Key considerations when reviewing your BCM include:
Are roles and responsibilities clear?
Are procedures up-to-date and practical under stress?
Are you compliant with relevant legislation and standards?
Have lessons from previous incidents been applied?
By following these steps, BCM not only protects your business from disruption but also strengthens your operational resilience, builds stakeholder confidence, and can even improve relationships with insurers.
Getting Started
If you haven’t already, NIG provides a Business Continuity Plan template to help you develop your own strategy. You can download it here. For further guidance, the UK Government’s BCM toolkit is an invaluable resource for developing and implementing a comprehensive approach. View it here.
