Business continuity explored

The Chartered Management Institute, in conjunction with the Continuity Forum and VERITAS Software, has published the results of its sixth annual business continuity survey. This took place in January 2005. The views of 440 mainly UK-based managers were obtained from a postal questionnaire sent to a random sample of individual CMI members.

BUSINESS CONTINUITY GROWTH
Encouragingly, the survey found that the uptake of business continuity planning continues to steadily increase, but the growth is much stronger amongst larger organisations:

• The number of organisations that have a business continuity plan covering their critical business activities stands at 51 percent, compared to 47 percent in 2004, 46 percent in 2003 and 45 percent in 2002.

• Business continuity planning is considerably more widespread in large organisations. Of those with a turnover of £11 million or more, 66 percent have a BCP, compared to just 34 percent of those with a turnover of under £11 million.

This top-end growth is reflected in what respondents reported as being the drivers behind the implementation of business continuity planning and management in their organisations. Corporate governance and central government requirements were reported to be the strongest drivers - a significant shift from previous years when customer demand was reported to be the leading driver. 46 percent of larger companies said that corporate governance was the main driver in their organisation.

THREATS
As in the previous surveys, managers were asked about the kinds of threats that might have a significant impact on their organisation. Loss of information technology systems and telecoms services were the top concerns, as they were in 2004. 70 percent of respondents reported that loss of IT was a highly significant threat – a sharp increase from 60 percent in 2004; and 64 percent included telecoms in their list.

In general, UK businesses seem to more aware of the threats that they face. Out of 16 threats explored by the survey, all but one, pressure group protest, saw an increase in the number of organisations concerned about each threat.

DISRUPTION
As well as exploring the threats faced by organisations, the survey looked at the actual disruptions and crises which had occurred. There was a strong correlation between the threat and the reality, with IT disruption heading the list (41 percent has experienced this in the past 12 months) and telecoms disruption coming third (25%). Interestingly, this was pushed down the list by ‘loss of people’, which at 28 percent was the second highest cause of disruption.

The survey also found that there had been a huge increase in the number of IT-related disruptions. In the 2004 survey 25 percent of respondents reported that they had had disruption caused by failures in this area – in 2005 this had increased to 41 percent.

Another area seeing substantial growth in reported disruption was ‘Loss of access to site ’ – the number of companies reporting this problem almost doubled, from 6 percent in 2004 to 11 percent in 2005.

The above are just some of the highlights of the survey. A much more extensive report can be read here.

•Date: 8th March 2005 • Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: BC statistics
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