Business Interruption Preparedness

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Will Rodgers

Did you know…?

  • 50% of businesses experiencing a disaster with no recovery plan will fail in the following 12 months
  • 40% of small businesses will go out of business if they can’t get to their data within 24 hours after a crisis
  • 43% of companies never resume business following a major fire. Another 35% are out of business in the following 3 years
  • Power interruptions cost U.S. $80 Billion annually (Berkeley Labs)

Is your organization ready for a business interruption? Even a short-lived business interruption can cost an organization substantially. Studies done by Berkeley Labs indicate that the cost for a power outage lasting less than 5 minutes cost twice as much as outages lasting longer.

Aldridge Kerr encourages its Clients to prepare its data, processes, people, and facilities for business interruption by building a Business Continuity Plan. Often, organizations concentrate on the data (Information Technology) component, but fail to consider either the implications of not being able to perform its critical tasks (processes) or the potential impact of a business interruption on its people and facilities.

Organizations do not consider that an interruption can be driven by a wide variety of reasons:

  • Data driven: viruses, disk failures, network problems, data corruption, etc.
  • Business driven: marketing campaigns that have a negative impact to the organization, launching a new product, failing to comply and/or new regulatory requirements, audits, workplace inaccessibility, etc.
  • Event driven:fires, natural disasters, mergers and acquisitions, terrorism, etc.

If you don’t have a Business Continuity Plan in place, begin by identifying your Critical Processes. Those are the processes that will have the biggest impact to your organization if an interruption occurs.

Aldridge Kerr can assist you in building a Business Continuity Plan.