The Open for Business business continuity planning tool is a free program offered by the Institute for Business and Home Safety. This tool can help your business develop plans to recovery from major business outages, from causes such as fires, long term power outages, and natural evens such as hurricanes. The link takes you to the webpage where you can select one of the two offered programs.

1.    Open for Business Basic, offers access to a series of worksheets that you can fill out and save. Please note that if you select the PDF type, that unless you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat or some other PDF program that allows you to save PDF documents, you will not be able to save your completed documents to your computer. Once completed it is strongly recommended that you print of a number of copies of each worksheet and store them in more than one secure area for redundancy.

Below the selection of worksheets, there is an offering for the Open for Business Basic Trainer. This online training program is a series of modules developed to assist you in completing the worksheets. These modules provide valuable information on concepts of disaster recovery that will assist you in making the proper choices of information to include on your worksheets. To access these modules without registering, look for the link “Continue without registering” on the bottom of the right hand box.

2.    Open for Business Online is a secured access program that expands on the basic program. This program is only available to member insurers and those persons holding insurance policies from the member insurers. To gain access to this site, you must have an access code from a member insurance company. Once received you may register for access to this secure site for added Open for Business program functionality.

Click here for the Open for Business Tool