OneBeacon Insurance is offering a new online resource to help small-business customers plan for and deal with natural and manmade disasters. Open for Business, a free Web-based disaster-recovery and risk-assessment tool developed by the Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), enables OneBeacon's smaller commercial customers to perform the kinds of disaster analysis and recovery planning that normally would be limited to much larger organizations.

IBHS is a nonprofit insurance industry organization dedicated to reducing the social and economic effects of natural disasters and other property losses. It created the interactive, online version of Open for Business exclusively for customers of member companies such as OneBeacon. "Catastrophe can occur in any number of ways," says Mike Keane, head of OneBeacon Small Business. "Damage to the building or inventory, a computer virus, or the loss of a critical supplier that has suffered its own disaster can be just as devastating as an earthquake, hurricane, or other natural event."

OneBeacon customers can identify risks from hurricanes, high winds, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes/hail, winter weather, and wildfire with the Open for Business Property Protection Plan, and they can use its Recovery Plan to establish customized procedures for recovering essential business functions.