There are many reasons to consider BCP. Let’s look at some of them. We’ll look first at the reasons in favour of having a plan:

• Downtime is Lost Money – Estimates show that companies lose from $40,000 to $100,000 per hour when their employees can’t access the data and applications that they use to run the business.
• Downtime is Frustrating – Customers and employees are both frustrated by the inability to carry on the transactions of business. And customers go elsewhere.
• Succession Planning – Your company is dependent upon it’s people and their knowledge. This is particularly true at the management levels. If a disastrous occurrence was to eliminate some of your managers, for the company to survive you would need to be able to quickly provide successors for those positions.
  • Leadership succession
  • Key personnel succession
• Loss of key personnel
• Ability to Stay in Business – One of the reasons that you are contemplating doing a plan is to able to stay in business should any disaster occur. Having a plan is place is an important part of this effort.
• Bankruptcy – the vast majority of business that suffer a major hit, and don’t have plan, will go bankrupt. They just do.
• Training – training your staff to think about their jobs and how to do them better in order to protect their jobs after an incident
• Priorities – Prioritize critical services or products
• Impacts – Identify impacts of disruptions
• Loss – Identify areas of potential revenue loss
• Expenses – Identify additional expenses
• Insurance – minimize insurance requirements
• Corporate Confidence – Preparedness gives confidence. It demonstrates a duty of care to your customers and suppliers.
• Customers’ Expectations – It’s a visible way of meeting your customers’ expectations
• Due Diligence – It emphasizes due diligence to key stakeholders.
• Your Reputation is at risk – It helps safeguard your company’s reputation.
• Legal Obligations – It ensures that you continue to operate and to meet legal, regulatory and contractual obligations.
  • Legal - you may have a legal obligation to maintain a good BCP
  • Regulatory – In some areas of business, regulatory demands are high and business continuity planning is a requirement. Examples are financial services, insurance, utilities and public transport.
  • Contractual – You do have contracts with your suppliers and your clients. These give them certain rights to expect that you will do whatever is required to meet the clauses of those contracts.
• Customer Demand – In an increasing number of cases, evidence of business continuity planning is demanded by the customer. Larger companies are increasingly dependent on their suppliers and with the continued emergence of just in time processes, suppliers can be a significant risk to their own business continuity. Thus, tenders and contracts often demand that potential suppliers prove their resilience.
• Investor Requirement – Organizations that fund or support start-ups and businesses undergoing expansion are risking their capital. Having in place a business continuity plan is a means of reducing some of the risks to which that investment is exposed.
• Governance – For many small businesses, it is a maturity thing. Once the owners recognize that they are in it for the long term, then they automatically start thinking about how to protect their long term investment in the business. The longer a business is operating, the more likely it will be exposed to a disruptive event, so it makes sense to plan how to survive the disruption.
• Past Experience – The impetus to start planning often comes after the company has experienced an adverse event, or has seen the effect an adverse event has had on others.
• To maintain your reputation (well run organizations have BCP’s, so if you want a reputation as a well run organization…)
• To satisfy financial partners (bankers and insurers).
• To fulfill essential services – if what you do is valuable, then being able to continue doing it should be important.
• Business Protection – You can want protect your business:
  • To protect your investment (if you are an owner).
  • To protect your livelihood (if you are an employee).
• It’s Cheap – Consider how much an hour of downtime will cost and then calculate how many hours your business can afford to lose.
• It’s Easy to Do – With good software, you can easily install and develop your plans.