Business continuity - what it means, and why it's important to NEAS
Business Continuity is about building and improving organisation resilience, identifying our key services and the most urgent activities that underpin them. NEAS has robust business continuity arrangements in place to ensure our services can remain deliverable through period(s) of disruption. Examples of disruption could be flooding and adverse weather conditions, power cuts and technological failure, supply failures, and pandemics. NEAS is assessed to see the risks of such events on the service as a whole and its activities and plans are made to reduce the impact of these disruptions to ensure its recovery is prioritised in the event of such disruptions.
As a Category 1 responder under the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), NEAS is passionate about achieving the Act’s requirements around Business Continuity Management and has a Business Continuity lifecycle in place to ensure efficient and effective, Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Business Continuity Plans (BCPS) and Business Continuity Action Cards are in place to guide NEAS to respond, recover, resume and re-store to a pre-defined level of operation following disruption in line with the Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) set out.
Furthermore, training and exercising are completed on a frequent basis to ensure validation of such arrangements as well as learning from live incidents via the Trusts debriefing processes. NEAS has a Business Continuity Manager in place who facilitates, supports & guides the organisation to ensure compliance.