Business Continuity Planning
Introduction
The more your business relies on its communication & information technology (CIT) systems, the more you need to consider how unexpected disruption might affect your business. These disruptions could come in many forms, from fire and floods to theft or malicious attacks on your premises and systems.
Business continuity planning (BCP) improves your businesses' ability to react to such disruptions. It describes how you will manage your operations in order to meet your business-critical requirements.
The benefits of CIT business continuity planning
The main benefit of business continuity planning is enabling your business to recover quickly from unexpected events that disrupt your CIT systems.
However, there are other good reasons to have a business continuity plan.
Customer reassurance
A business that can demonstrate an effective business continuity plan has a competitive advantage. For example, if you provide services to your customers that are dependent upon your CIT systems, like a customer service, help desk or sales lines, then evidence of a sound plan can be used to win or retain customers. For instance, if your business is a partner in a supply chain, business continuity planning may well need to be an integral part of your quality assurance.
Being able to answer your telephone number to callers is a prerequisite of any BCP process!
MessageBase BCP Support Service can be ‘bespoked’ to meet a clients’ exact BCP needs, but would include out-of-hours access to our client helpdesk, holding of multiple special caller response scripts to deal with different event situations.
MessageBase and our Partners can help you plan, organise and manage your business continuity processes. Our partners include Integral Specialist Services, N-Tire Systems & Edge Solutions.
MessageBase provides outsourced, switchboard managed services on a permanent, ad-hoc, ‘overflow’ or emergency event only basis.
The service is bespoke to the clients’ specific requirements but can include:
- Two or more scripts to be activated to meet particular BCP events
- 0830h to 1800h Standard Service Hours
- 24/7 Operation Option
- 0845 non-geographic number to divert your calls your ‘local call rate’
- 24/7 ability to advise MessageBase of ‘activation’ of BCP
“Yesterday at around 10:00 am we lost all power to our office because of a supply failure which was not corrected until around 9:00 pm. This presented us with a huge challenge, but also provided an opportunity to put into practise the emergency measures that we had prepared as part of our Business Continuity Plan. It also meant that we would be able to gauge the robustness and effectiveness not just of our systems and plans, but also of the companies with whom we have relationships and depend upon in these circumstances.
I am very pleased to report that Messagebase provided exemplary support and enabled us to maintain a public presence in such difficult circumstances.
Thank you and all the team”
Housing Ombudsman Service, London