Business Continuity Management – A holistic view in strategic way
Introduction
A series of major global crises including pandemics, terrorist attacks, a financial recession, tsunamis, cyber-attacks and earthquakes – have demonstrated that even the most unlikely catastrophes can occur and seriously debilitate business operations. In response, stakeholders and regulators are demanding that organizations include business continuity planning in their risk management and business models, to ensure that if a catastrophe occurs, operations and services will not be disrupted. A good business continuity plan invokes a high level of trust and confidence in an organization. It also helps protect organizational assets and minimizes legal liability. Most organizations find it an uphill task to effectively create and enforce a business continuity plan. Apart from the complexity of realistically simulating disaster scenarios, there is the difficulty of coordinating risk management and internal controls activities across the enterprise, and testing and updating continuity plans at regular intervals. Many organizations approach these processes manually which only drives costs higher. Moreover, most business continuity plans are restricted to the internal boundaries of an organization, which puts them at risk of disruptions caused outside e.g. in the supply chain.
It’s important to have a business continuity plan in place to identify and address resiliency synchronization between business processes, applications and IT infrastructure. To withstand and thrive during these many threats, businesses have realized that they need to do more than create a reliable infrastructure that supports growth and protects data. Companies are now developing holistic business continuity plans that can keep your business up and running, protect data, safeguard the brand, retain customers – and ultimately help reduce total operating costs over the long term. Having a business continuity plan in place can minimize downtime and achieve sustainable improvements in business continuity, IT disaster recovery, corporate crisis management capabilities and regulatory compliance.
Enterprise Risk Assessment
- Identify the risks to your business : The first step of any risk assessment, including a business continuity risk assessment, is to identify what factors threaten your business operations. It could be anything from a natural or a man-made disaster to embezzlement or robberies to an overnight slump in your organization’s reputation. List out all factors that could put your business at risk.
- Analyze the impact to your business: Your business may be at risk due to the factors that you identified above. How will these risks impact your business? Think of all possible scenarios specific to your business. Could there be a financial impact? Could the risk affect your staff? Or perhaps your supply chain will be affected? Could an event affect your organization’s reputation and goodwill? Even if only a part of your operation is affected by an incident, the impact could still be huge. Each risk factor should be considered separately when performing a business impact analysis.
- Check your current risk management plan: A lot of the identified risk factors that threaten your organization’s operations can be monitored, thanks to modern technology. For instance, some natural disasters and hazards such as hurricanes, snowfall, or floods are easily monitored. However, incidents such as fire, protests, violence, or shootings are not predictable. So, are there engineering controls that can prevent these risks from harming your business? If you do have a risk management plan, check if it is still effective after your inventory of potential threats.
- Think of ways to restore your operations: The critical business operations of your business must be recoverable after an unfortunate incident that threatens its continuity. While performing a business continuity risk assessment, you must also have a thorough plan to restore your operations. Could installing a mass communication system through an app or email help limit the threat to a recoverable level? Have you assigned roles to your staff to deal with each of the business continuity threats you identified? Think of these questions during risk assessment.
- Prepare a contingency plan: All businesses should design their physical and digital infrastructure in a way that it is resistant to potential continuity risks. However, in case your business is not resistant or even restorable upon an adverse impact, you must always have a contingency plan. Think of the critical components of your business operations and how you can reestablish these operations in case of business continuity mishap
Business Impact Assessment
A rigorous Business Impact Analysis (BIA), including an analysis of recovery strategy options, addresses the key first step of aligning business requirements with IT recovery capabilities. Using its comprehensive BIA process, Tannum identifies the business processes and information technology that are critical to the livelihood of an organization by determining the quantitative and qualitative impacts of downtime. The process further defines the organization’s target Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).
Recovery Strategy
Our teams design effective and thorough recovery plans and strategies that address the real impacts of an outage on your business operations. From the BIA to plan development and testing, our consultants help you mitigate business, environmental, man-made and technology risks inherent in your business.
Defining your business continuity strategy reduces the impact of a disruption and the cost of compliance, while improving the efficiency of recovery efforts – reducing wasted time and money. TANNUM Consulting provides a detailed design (depending on your predefined recovery objectives, strategies and scenarios) and implements the technology infrastructure needed to recover assets and continue IT-supported business processes. We focus on the key people, processes, technology assets and data that are vital to your operations.
Business Continuity Plan
Exercises keep your Business Continuity planning program in line with your business requirements and objectives on an ongoing basis by validating whether your plans will achieve your pre-defined RTOs and RPOs. Tannum consultants are experts in executing tests and simulations of predefined recovery and contingency procedures and making recommendations for improvement.
Recovery Test
In the event of a disaster, the absence of a clear plan combined with lack of communication makes the situation much worse. Every second counts and a crisis can escalate quickly with long term impact on your reputation and bottom line. Swiftly access your comprehensive crisis management plans to deliver a centralized response with clear roles and tasks to any event.
Action Management
Things don’t always go according to plan. If you can’t identify when and why things went wrong, you can’t fix them for next time. And there will be a next time. Assess what happened during your incident or exercise and understand why it happened with action management. Leverage full workflow capabilities to document actions, follow up on issues and track remediation plans and assignments to discover what to do differently next time.
Dashboard & Analytics
One of the biggest challenges for business continuity managers is getting executive leadership buy-in. Without support from executives, business continuity programs struggle to get the budget and resources they need to succeed. With our easy to read and comprehensive executive and management dashboards, your executive leadership can obtain profound insight into the success of your business continuity program.
