Today, companies recognise the need to be prepared and are striving to meet the demand for continuous service. With the growth of e-Commerce and other factors demanding all day and year-round availability, the average organisation is required to recover from a major system outage within two to 24 hours (Gibb and Buchanan, 2006) and the need for business survival necessitates planning for a range of disruptions.
BCM supports the organisation and is generally embedded in the strategic framework and corporate culture (Cerullo and Cerullo, 2004). Categories of continuity planning may include disaster recovery plans, business resumption plans, business recovery plans and contingency plans (Noakes-Fry and Diamond, 2001). There are three major types of business disruption considered by the BCM: internal disruption in the firm (eg. control, process), disruptions external to the company but internal to the supply chain, and disruptions external to the firm and supply chain (Christopher and Peck, 2004). Typical examples of these three categories are: natural disasters, hardware and communications failure, sabotage or acts of terrorism. Strohl (2002) found that 50% of the continuity planning that professionals are most concerned with are accidental failures (i.e. internal causes such as power outages, equipment failure, software errors and operational errors). The threat of natural disaster (i.e. earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes) are ranked as the second-greatest cause of concern. Intentional externally-caused disasters (such as hackers, terrorism, acts of war) are ranked third (Cerullo and Cerullo, 2004).
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