What are High Impact events?
There are any number of events that can be considered hight impact, planing for them all is a major project in its own right. But lets take a hard look at what is likely to impact your business, the approach that you should take is to analyse the customet impact and work back to the prevention or mitigations that are practical.
A failure of the public electricity suppy or the public water suppy would certainly be considered high impact, as would a major weather event that disrupted supply chains or staff mobility – all of which you are unlikely to be able to mitigate without significant cost.
The loss of a key supplier, customer or key member of staff could also fall into the high impact category – but good management and some planing is likely to significantly reduce the impact.
All the above events could be considered high impact, in reality all of them are also low probability – but none of them are impsossible. So the weighting that you give to these potential events in the continuity plan should reflect the likelihood of occurrence, this is important – particularly when a business is young and growing at an accelerated rate.
What constitutes low probability?
Defining low probability is dependent on a number of variables, each business will have an understanding of the likely frequency of events that are high impact. An example from my personal life is the public electricity supply, when I was based in a major urban conurbation I didn’t suffer a single loss of supply in an almost 15 year period. A move of the business to a new rural location found me having three significant power outages in a little over a year, one lasting for eight days and another causing significant equipment damage affecting me and a number of other businesses.
So up until the relocation I would have classed a power outage as low probability, after the relocation not so much – as to mitigation a UPS and a generator were sufficient – but added costs that were not originally budgeted.
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