Emergency planning for businesses

Contents

Stage 2: Business continuity management strategies

Once you understand the risks that could harm your business, you can decide what strategies to use. These could: 

  • remove the likelihood of them happening
  • help to ease the impact if they did happen 

Strategy options 

There are 4 broad strategy options. 

You may need different strategies for each of your critical activities. 

  1. Accept the risk and do nothing. 

This might be appropriate if the cost of doing something to reduce the risk, is greater than the potential damage from that risk. 

  1. Accept the risk but seek mutual aid. 

You could achieve this by having a 'buddy' agreement with another business. You'd share facilities and resources with them if one of the businesses were affected by an incident. 

  1. Reduce the risk by taking mitigating actions. 

For example, put in place tried-and-tested backup and recovery arrangements for technology and data. 

  1. Remove the risk. 

Stop or change an activity or process that carries too much risk to something more manageable.