Business Continuity For Dummies

Introduction

Business continuity (BC) involves building resilience in your business: identifying its key products and services and the critical activities that underpin them, and devising strategies so that you can trade through a disruption and recover afterwards. We see BC as being a bit like New Year resolutions: go on a diet, do more exercise, eat more fruit – you know the drill. People promise themselves they’re going to do these things because they know that they should be doing them and can’t deny that they won’t benefit from making the effort. But in the end – normally, by 2 or 3 January – they just don’t do them. ‘It’s too hard’, ‘I can’t be bothered’, ‘I don’t have enough time’ . . . people use any number of excuses that don’t really stack up.

Similarly, businesses know that they should be doing BC, and yes, believe it or not, would rather like to have it in their business. The problem is that people see BC as being too expensive and time-consuming, and the guidance available isn’t aimed at smaller businesses.

But no longer. Although any size of business can use this book, we aim it specifically at small- and medium-sized enterprises (or SMEs). As the Prime Minister reminded people at the 2011 World Economic Forum, SMEs are the ‘engines of job creation’, and this has been the case for a long time. Their resilience and continuity is important for all sorts of different reasons, but most prominently to:

Provide a source of jobs.

Provide a market for goods and services. ...