Emergency Response and Business Continuity

Emergency Response and Business Continuity

When faced with an emergency scenario, you may feel like you have to juggle two competing aims: responding to the emergency at hand and keeping your business running and generating revenue. This article is going to cover what both emergency response and business continuity look like, their differences and their similarities.

Emergency response focuses on:

  • The safety of staff in an emergency
  • The protection of staff from avoidable emergencies
  • The protection of assets during an emergency
  • The protection of the environment during and after an emergency

Business continuity focuses on:

  • Getting up and running as soon as possible
  • Continuing to provide service during an emergency
  • Maintaining full or reduced service until normal operation can resume

Differences Between Emergency Response and Business Continuity

1. The Goals
While both practices fall under the umbrella of preparedness, they have markedly different goals. Emergency response aims to protect people and essential assets from harm through pre-planned safety and evacuation procedures. Business continuity, however, doesn’t involve personnel and instead focuses on the ways in which business operations can either continue or resume as swiftly as possible.

While effective emergency response planning will make business continuity much easier, running your business shouldn’t ever be the main focus of a plan—human lives always come first.

2. Tasks
There’s often some overlap between emergency response and business continuity.

Emergency response focuses on how personnel and resources should be directed in the case of an emergency. Tasks associated with emergency response include drills, training, identifying your first responder liaison and evacuation procedures.

Business continuity, on the other hand, will focus on factors associated with a business’s infrastructure. Tasks include making sure that the company has a good online reputation, redundant systems are maintained and ensuring necessary backup and duplicate data is safely stored.

3. Planning

How you plan for responding to an emergency and how you plan on keeping business moving differs in a few key areas.

Staff involved with emergency response need to perform various risk assessments such as the likelihood for different types of crisis like natural disasters, chemical leaks, fire and so on. Once risks are assessed, plan for the different emergencies most pertinent to your business.

Preparing for business continuity, staff members should focus on how to minimize disruption to the company and the service they provide during and after an emergency. This includes having an alternate location in the case of fire, having a secondary power source in a blackout and having non-traditional ways to communicate with employees. Unlike with emergency response, only a few staff members need to be aware of business continuity plans.

Allied Rental Can Prepare You for Both

One thing that is necessary for business continuity and emergency response planning is having a way to keep things running and power tools necessary for safety in an emergency. Generators can keep you safe and help business continue through an emergency.

Allied Rental Company has many different options for diesel-fueled generators, all of which can be found on our website. Available for rental for days, weeks and months at a time, these generators are sure to meet your business’s needs for as long as is required.