Why are UK businesses invoking their business continuity plans?
ICM Continuity Services has released new data showing the number and nature of invocations of business continuity plans amongst their 2,000 strong regional customer base. The graphic data, covering 2010, suggests that more than 80 per cent of invocations last year were due to hardware failures, as IT downtime continues to be the main cause of business disruption to UK businesses.?
ICM’s service invocation data has also revealed that more than half of hardware failure invocations were a result of the customer not having adequate maintenance cover in place to protect their equipment against failures. John Mills, Service Delivery Director at ICM, says: “More frequently we are seeing companies trying to rely on their BC provider as an emergency fix as they have reduced IT maintenance to save operating expense. As the economy strives to escape from recession, many businesses are continuing to cut costs by not obtaining the level of IT support they need and simply hoping that their equipment will be covered under warranty or hold out for another year – unfortunately this is not the case and could prove to be more costly than the support originally contracted. Companies need to ensure that they have cover in place from their IT Service Provider to fix these issues quickly on site so that they don’t need to invoke their full business continuity plans and recover systems from scratch.”
The results also pointed to that loss of power and communications as challenges to UK businesses. John Mills adds: “Today’s emerging technologies are becoming increasingly more power hungry and we are seeing more cases of companies having to invoke their BC plans because the local grid is unable to cope with the demands being placed on it. As we move closer to the 2012 Olympics and the closure of carbon emitting power stations, it will really test whether the grid can cope with the demand; this is not an issue that just affects London – it affects the whole of the UK.”
Mike Osborne, Managing Director of ICM, says: “The scale of loss incurred by businesses arising out of unavailability of service were recently highlighted by research following the bad weather that hit the UK in 2010, which the Federation of Small Businesses revealed cost the economy between £600 million and £1 billion every day. What our research shows is that Business continuity is now more than just planning for the extreme events such as a flooding, snow, fire or terrorist activity; it is about preparing your business for the everyday challenges that could occur, such as loss of IT and power failure, that collectively can have a huge cost to business whilst not hitting the headlines. Business continuity plans not only ensure that organisations do not suffer significant loss of revenue, but they are also increasingly being requested by customers as a guarantee that their provider is still able to meet their requirements – come what may.”
