A recent survey by the Chartered Management Institute reported that in 2007 about 1 in 3 businesses had business disruptions, due to loss of their IT (39%) or of their people (32%).

Those affected by extreme weather rose from 9% in 2006 to 28% in 2007.

The other categories of disruption were:

• Extreme weather e.g. flood/high winds
• Loss of telecommunications
• Utility outage e.g. electricity, gas, water, sewage
• Loss of key skills
• Negative publicity/coverage
• Employee health and safety incident
• Supply chain disruption
• Loss of access to site
• Damage to corporate image/reputation/brand
• Pressure group protest
• Industrial action
• Environmental incident
• Customer health/product safety issue/incident
• Fire
• Terrorist damage

As you can see business disruption is not only from weather, flood, fire or bomb.

A large part of the ability to keep your business going is down to using a written process to carry out business functions so that if necessary someone else could do the process.

In a similar way identify what you would do if your computer systems were unavailable.