Small Business Advice Newsletter

Data Protection Registration

The Data Protection Act requires all organisations which handle personal information to comply with a number of important principles regarding privacy and disclosure.

If a business maintains files with personal details it may be necessary to register the business with the Information Commissioner in order to comply with the Data Protection Act. Many businesses think that it doesn't apply to them, but you might be surprised to find that the Act usually applies unless you are an individual holding personal information for your own domestic use. The requirements are quite broad with few exemptions. So if your business is not already registered, you are advised to check with the Information Commissioner's Office to find out if you need to register.

Registration costs just £35 per annum and further information or registration can be done online at http://www.ico.gov.uk.

Instructions are included on the website explaining how to make a new notification or modify an existing notification. If payment to the Information Commissioner is made using a Direct Debit the annual renewal is automatic and the company is invited annually by the Information Commissioner to notify any changes – this avoids forgetting to make the renewal.

Do not be misled by bogus companies offering to register or re-register your company. There are a lot of “scams” around – they charge significantly more than the actual fee and may not actually register the company correctly if at all.

For more help and advice about Data Protection registration, please contact us
 

Business Continuity Planning
   - the first steps

Over the next few months we are going to run through the steps to enable you to produce a Business Continuity Plan. This will form the basis to enable you to put in place the safeguards and contingencies needed to enable your business to continue trading in the event that your business is struck by a disaster.

There could be a number of potential threats to your business ranging from simple power outages to more serious incidents such as fire or flood. Or it could be as simple as what to do if a key member of staff has an accident and cannot work. The trick is to identify in advance what action you would take in the event of these things actually occurring. That way you stand a better chance of your business surviving the disaster.

The stages in producing a plan involve:

• Identifying and prioritising your critical business processes, i.e. those things that you do in your business that would cause you the most problems if you couldn't carry them out, e.g. not being able to pay suppliers, or invoice clients.
• Assessing the impact of not being able to carry out those processes and determining how long you could do without them.
• Listing the potential threats and risks to those processes and assessing the likelihood of them occurring.
• Producing a matrix of process, threats and impacts
• Developing a Disaster Recovery Plan that states how you would deal with each eventuality that you deem needs to be safeguarded. In many cases this will require putting procedures in place that ensure that you have the necessary information or data to hand when you need it, such as keeping data backups off-site. This plan also needs to include how you would communicate to staff that a disaster has occurred and that the contingency plan is in effect and what they need to do.
• Communicating the plans to all staff and identifying the key managers that would take responsibility for invoking relevant parts of the plan in the event of a disaster.

We will be tackling each of these steps in future issues of this newsletter, but if you would like help or advice on this subject in the meantime, then please contact us
 

Product Recommendations

We like to recommend products with which we have personal experience.

This month we would like to bring you some advanced news of products that we have been trialling and which we will shortly be featuring on our website.

We feature some of these products in our online catalogue, but for some items you may be referred to our partner sites to make an actual purchase.
 

Regulatory & Other Updates

Each month we will feature some of the recent regulatory updates or other important news affecting small businesses:

Contact us if you would like any further information about the items in this newsletter.

Please let us have any feedback you might have, and also let us know if there are any articles you would like to see covered in future issues by sending an email to sales@wise.co.uk.

Best regards,

Tim Weaver

Weaver Information Services (Europe) Limited trading as WISE.CO.UK,
Telephone +44 (0) 1438 453013. Email info@wise.co.uk
Registered office 11 Watton Road, Knebworth SG3 6AH.
Registered in England no. 2618391. VAT registration GB 573 1139 51.