Preparing for the unexpected is an unfavorable process. BC planning is an attitude, knowledge, tools, and technology. It is hard work, not gratifying because there are no finish lines or goals crossing landmarks. Business continuity (BC) requirement is a recent drive of a diverse client market (in terms of industry, size, and geographic location) and an underwhelming practice by the top-down management of staff and users on full and efficient day-by-day engagement of the associated services. Strengthen the culture where the “BC activity” is fully integrated into the daily business, as well as basic service activities (add a WebClient to the top communication tool). Further strategies on accomplishing user support are reported by Bottani et al., who also focused on the underway on company role, service depiction, associated utility to business, focus on service level registration, associated infrastructure limitations, and operation readiness (skills, operational, and technology issues) to have process into calm during the time of crises and to build a process baby step table path alignment.
During the past decade, business continuity (BC) has matured and expanded thanks to major events such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Business continuity planning (BCP) moved from a non-essential process (associated with IT only and limited to application recovery) to a business process requirement (which includes backup plans in case of catastrophic events, impact reporting related to single and multiple business delays, and plans associated with people and asset protection, as well as sales, operations, and inventory continuity). The following research investigated solutions offered by business continuity consulting firms (BCCF) to gaped firms. Fourteenth hypotheses were tested against ten BCCF’s websites and five major consulting firms’ websites. The research found that the interest in business continuity was increasing, and the kind of services offered were many and addressed the most relevant BC components, as well as considered gaped companies requiring help and solutions from an increasingly mature BC organization.
Importance of Business Continuity Planning
A business continuity plan is a comprehensive statement of consistent actions to be taken before, during and after any disaster. The plan documents an organization’s planning for continuity and/or recovery of business operations, during and after a disaster. It also consolidates all other plans and relevant information, both internal and external to the organization and is used to assist the organization in the awareness of threats, hazards and vulnerabilities that could impact the business; in developing a proactive strategy to address these threats, hazards and vulnerabilities; facilitate a proactive response plan to prevent or minimize the impact on the business operations during a disaster; to meet contractual and customer requirements; and for assurance of central coordination, accountability, recovery and restoration of mission-critical operations.
This introduction offers an overview of the important issue of and need for business continuity strategies. In the ever-changing nation and global economy, business needs to remain vigilant in its efforts to adequately prepare for the unexpected. The aftermath of September 11th has underscored the need for companies to redouble their efforts to prepare and protect their human resources, data, facilities, and important operating procedures against any event that could hinder the company’s success or even threaten its very survival. Business continuity planning can help assure the survival of the company by minimizing such losses.
Identifying Potential Risks
The threat analysis step details the forms of harm or damage that could result from an identified risk and how likely it is to occur. This step differentiates between the potential risks that an organization faces, and it enables an organization to prioritize core activities and hazards where changes in the cost of a risk and its associated frequency require additional attention. Once businesses understand the individual risks identified in Step 1 well enough to ask detailed, probing questions in Step 2, they will be better positioned in the second step to isolate the impacts to their workflow activities. A recognized leader in business continuity planning, Agility Recovery Solutions, considers this the most critical step—along with Step 5, Loss Prevention Planning—to building the Business Continuity Plan, and one that should be completed with thorough, systematic care. If a threat of a potential risk cannot be quantified, i.e., if the probability is indeterminate, businesses should therefore either drop the risk from consideration or convert the probability assessment and may desire to convert the risk into a condition that is simpler to understand.
Making changes to a company’s business model—especially under the pressure of a catastrophic event—brings with it an inherent risk. By analyzing already-identified potential risks, an organization can avoid a great deal of business-disrupting rethinking and restructuring in the middle of a disaster. The nature of catastrophic events dictates the appropriate response, which can span from minor modification of business operations to a full-scale overhaul. By evaluating potential risk, a company can determine where it lies within that scope. Consulting firms recommend a Risk Analysis step to determine which specific impacts of a disaster can be most harmful and to assign a tangible value for economic planning for how to best handle those impacts should they occur. BC WebWise explains that such risks may include injury to employees, violations of contract terms, unmet tax obligations, lack of regulatory compliance, and various physical risks to facilities, e.g. flood damage.
Assessing Business Impact
Given that acts or situations come true that prevent the organization from providing the important functions, business objectives and priorities can be put at risk. These events can lead to enormous support, individual harassment, easier cyber manipulations, or preventable environmental activities.
Identifying what increases the risks of the interruption of these functions, such as buildings, equipment, or external infrastructures, in addition to the financial and strategic losses after the occurrence. Protecting business activities, supported by new technologies and existing technologies, requires support and profiling. The underlying challenge is the company’s support, protection, and continuity, pursuing the asymmetric goal of moving business activities to the profit zone.
When looking at a company at risk, an initial step for any intervention is the definition of those functions and the areas involved in high organizational risks, whether natural, such as earthquakes, fires, explosions, climate-related disasters, or man-made activities, such as interference. human factor.
The business enterprise has come to rely heavily on the complex, intertwined web of interconnected technologies that break down general functions and processes in the pare of making up the necessary activities that support the customer of today. Making sure that these processes fulfill their purpose is an issue that goes beyond the implementation of the safety and protection measures, being translated into the analysis and understanding of the effects of the interruptions that come true in business activities.
Strategies for Business Continuity
Most professionals associate a BCM program with a specific standard, 13.2 standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 22301. There are others, for example, the U.S. government provides guidance through a series of documents. The consequences if various outcomes of disruptive events are not studied and prepared for are revealed through analysis of what happened to organizations that failed to prepare, as collected by the BCM consulting firms via case studies. It turns out that a significant problem with planning has to do with mapping.
This section has two main goals. We first review the principal activity of BCM consulting. We then dive deeply into the roadmapping process, the activity that is central to the preparation for the unexpected. A business continuity plan (BCP) is sometimes defined as a documentation of a predetermined response to an emergency or disaster. A professional consulting firm will properly position the BCP within a larger program and provide tools that aid in navigation within the program and in relation to clients’ own efforts. At a minimum, a BCP does document the information and procedures needed to continue operations in the time immediately prior and in the time immediately following an emergency or disaster that makes normal operations either untenable or significantly impeded. More generally, the BCP is an outcome of an effort that would be labeled BCP design and includes:
Developing a Comprehensive Plan
Companies often turn to business continuity consulting companies for their advice on how to plan for an emergency or disaster and to develop a disaster recovery program. The consulting firms possess expertise in a wide range of business topics, allowing insurance companies, brokers, and other organizations to obtain their assistance and provide training as required in order to ensure successful and professional implementation of contingency plans. Their team of disaster experts offer a range of critical services – cost-effective business continuity planning, risk management, part of an overall continuity and security program; contingency planning for business events, employee and business processes, and call center planning. The firms offer non-regulatory products as well, but it is their COVID-19 pandemic programs that make them different from their mainstream competitors. When a disaster strikes and the need is urgent, these businesses must be well-prepared so that when they are called upon to support their customers and clients and deliver mission-critical resources, they are ready and willing to step forth.
Risks may be minimized by developing a comprehensive plan that contains: a risk management/document management process in which the document and data repositories recognize the value and integrity of the data and documents they manage; document access controls that ensure only qualified users may access the information; a tested contract classification system with documents indexed by classification code; an organization-wide records management policy that recognizes all of the risks associated with document management and control; and contingency plans such as those established in this risk management policy, in which vital records are identified and those business processes are established and documents and data may be managed if a disaster occurs. An organization’s business processes and systems are critical and should be designed to include business processes and critical data/documents, and to ensure that when a specific department or process within an organization has been temporarily deactivated by such a disaster, those in a similar category can continue to carry out the mission of the organization.
Establishing Communication Channels
BCP can help to create the necessary teams. Currently residing in other countries, many companies are there because their policies require them to provide 24-hour coverage to their customers, something which is sometimes achieved by teams which have members in both hemispheres. As a rule of thumb, contacts in each business location are provided to people who work the same shift at a continental level. One of the great advantages of having people reside in many locations is that by doing this, the team can be assembled and ready to work at no additional cost besides that one of some cell phone charges, in the case that cellular communications are to be re-established. By working night shifts too, the remote contingency team may, in case of a daylight accident, have all the data required collected and ready for important decisions and a good night’s sleep can be immediately followed by a business handing over their work to their continental counterparts.
Once we have identified the message which the organization-wide notification of the contingency team should carry, we are ready to create detailed scenarios to be executed by each alternative communication system that we have at our disposition. Scenarios will define, among other valuable information, what team members should do to create alternate communication pathways, and how they should use them to gather the required information, and then to notify the BCP responsible for contacting everyone who is pertinent. The bottom line is that the information about everyone’s condition will get to the right recipient as fast as possible, thus allowing the responsible to deal with the situation next.
Implementing Backup Systems and Data Recovery
Backup software and storage devices can be utilized for protection and recovery. Large companies have extensive infrastructure and choice for on-site solutions. However, small and medium-sized companies can have difficulty purchasing and managing their infrastructure because of limited staff and budget constraints. Eventually, companies believe they have created the correct backup systems, but they have not performed any plan tests. Similarly, they do not regularly maintain backup systems, which leads to failure when plans need to be restored. Another important point to be observed is that many companies store their physical backups in the same building where the data is generated. Consider an infrastructure failure; the entire backup infrastructure could be destroyed. But a backup strategy does not contain only the backup systems.
One of the most important aspects of business continuity and subsequently, emergencies, is the guarantee of the integrity, availability, and continuity of the business information. Information is a strategic tool of any business and should be protected against unauthorized disclosure, deletion, or modification by anyone. Additionally, it is essential that it is always available when necessary. Implementing secure infrastructure with redundancy, backup systems, and data recovery are essential measures to ensure these aspects. Smaller companies or medium-sized companies generally do not have the knowledge, resources, or infrastructure to manage disaster recovery efficiently. They could have higher investments by dedicating resources to manage it. In this way, utilizing cloud computing can reduce these large investments.
Solutions Offered by Business Continuity Consulting Firms
Often, rather than addressing the immediate business continuity or disaster recovery challenges, consulting firms will focus on the business, such as the objectives in implementing or enhancing the business continuity strategy. Many factors are associated with implementing or creating the plans and procedures to manage the successful business continuity strategy. These plans and procedures might be enhancements that dovetail with business continuity program operation implementation associated with how a business, as a larger entity, is organized, operated, and where technology is leveraged. In those cases, often a test of the business continuity strategy plan or program can be initiated to see if and where these are improved with additional enhancements. Business Continuity Strategies then develop strategies based on data center concentration in support of the service level requirements needed to support the organization’s specific business processes. A business continuity strategy always has a technology component and business requirement where both need to be met and tested.
The following section presents the business continuity solutions most often provided by business continuity consulting firms. A business continuity consulting firm may be made up of a group of individuals, all with similar backgrounds, or have multiple skill sets by representing various industries and backgrounds. These consulting firms may be a subsidiary of a larger organization, be networked with other consulting firms, partnered with software providers to develop, sell, and support certain capabilities, or use their own proprietary software. These business continuity consulting companies are also comprised of firms with solid experience to those fairly new to the field. What differentiates these consulting firms in the marketplace is their approach to solving the immediate or long-term complex requirements and where they focus on how high or low they start in looking at whether the organization has a viable business continuity program. Following are some of the objectives where a business continuity consulting firm may focus and the services that encompass these objectives.
Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis
BIA provides necessary data for appropriate planning, organization, and evaluation of coping strategies related to potential threats and risks. Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a risk management and risk assessment of all business company’s key activities, liable for solving key company problems during the plan. BIA ids the means for evaluating the potential and other effects of interruptions in an organization’s key program and routine activities that should be used as an insurance policy to help the organization revert these activities within a mandatory and acceptable degree of time using software before the business continues to meet these objectives. However, three BIA objectives are essential: (1) to evaluate the effect of changes on the company’s service during and after an interruption, (2) to quantify the necessary resources it takes to complete its long as the company’s program activities are stabilized and (c) to obtain information needed for computer entry into the future programs similar uses.
Risk assessment (or risk analysis or risk management) and business impact analysis (BIA) are two separate but related components of business continuity. Risk assessment involves evaluating external and internal threats, alerting systems, processes, markets, etc. of potential impacts and identifying the likelihood of the threats occurring, which can lead to “viability impacts to the changes.” Organizations that stress risks deal with natural disasters, human error, fraud, terrorism impact (terrorism) and sabotage, and organizations need to have means to mitigate, avoid or eliminate these risks. Some of the potential risks are the possibilities that any number of things will happen, including, but not limited to, criminal acts of nature and/or terrorism, or those with the company’s service provider/vendor, fraud, non-core function or business systems. There are several checklists or questions that must be espoused to see if Risk Management is functioning properly, including “Do we have Key Lines of Business Impacts documented for each risk? Is vital business or critical business project affected by the activity assumed to have been assessed? Sometimes there more often mature Risk Management supply lists will be used to establish Key Lines of Business Impacts for risks, such as the possibility of losses or disruption to ongoing business operations or erosion of reputation or customer service. These will be the top-priority risks used with your risk management budget.
Business Continuity Plan Development and Testing
Organizations that do not fully understand the process recovery capability are risking a substantial part of their revenue. Therefore, any substantial tension third parties who do not recognize the value of the process recovery will risk action management and the ability to respond. Because the organization is vulnerable when business activities are critical, it is well-known that third parties participating in the tests recognize their important roles managing the processing recovery.
The final step of creating a successful plan is the continuity plan testing activities, which evaluates processing recovery in hands-on, realistic test exercises, and exercises and awareness sessions to ensure staff capacity and acceptance. Participating in exercises that simulate an emergency event allows the plan to be observed and adjusted to respond to potential roadblocks and weaknesses. Tables, walkthroughs, landing rehearsals, and complete simulation drills are helpful venues to ensure awareness; specific duties, and communication surroundings are fully responsive to preparedness strategies.
A business continuity plan (BCP) focuses on the restoration or recovery of an organization’s central departments; though, like an IT disaster recovery plan that focuses on systems used to support critical business functions, the technology itself is not as important as the people and the processes that the plan involves—identified in advance, with corresponding roles and responsibilities, tested and approved to provide an organization with the necessary action checklists, fallback plans, and decision-making protocols during a crisis situation.
Among the most substantial offerings by business continuity consulting firms is their expertise in the development of business continuity plans, which generally includes the development of crisis management, tactical response, and business resumption plans and procedures for incident or event management, emergency response, business process recovery, crisis decision making in the early hours or days of a disruption, and the communication, coordination, and first actions needed to both support the organization’s actual recovery efforts and protect the brand and reputation—stakeholder impressions and relationships—that are vital to its long-term resilience and business success.
Crisis Management and Incident Response Training
Leadership roles must be assumed, guided by the team leader and their plan, by recognizing the incident and convening on a timely basis for their management efforts. Responders must have developed knowledge, skills, and abilities to ensure a rapid and level-headed response, brought about by a sense of knowledge and skill of the crisis management and incident management programs employed by the company. Many crisis consultants stress the “lack of practice” as a critical reason that crisis response staffs fail to perform. Therefore, making it part of the organization’s culture by utilizing tabletop exercises, scenario planning, and interactive newly developed software can make the difference between an effective respondent and a chaotic and incoherent effort.
In the heightened level of security and business preparedness today, crisis management and incident response training is a critical, not an optional training requirement for all organizations. Many business continuity consulting firms provide viable programs and services that are most often used at the time of a disaster to develop and test plans for developing a well-coordinated and consistent response to incidents and crises, in order to mitigate the public relations and operational impacts. Many of the programs will result in designing team charters, developing plans, preparing evaluation checklists, providing reference materials, and generating reports for improvement. State-of-the-art training and skill building must be delivered in the following areas for an organization to prepare for, manage, and respond effectively to sudden incidents.
