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Vendor due diligence is essential in mitigating risks and securing your business operations. With mounting regulatory demands and shifting market conditions, understanding how to assess vendor risks and compliance is more critical than ever.
This blog post is your starting point for integrating due diligence into your business practice, offering strategies without disclosing specific checklist items too early.
Vendor Due Diligence (VDD) forms the basis of a secure vendor selection process. It helps you assess third-party vendors in terms of:
This process provides a solid foundation for informed decision-making, effective risk management, and enhanced operational efficiency (including business continuity).
The due diligence process primarily includes regulatory compliance assessments and, depending on the situation and your organization’s risk appetite, may also include:
Together, these steps are crucial for an unbiased analysis of a particular vendor. Conducting thorough due diligence safeguards will help your organization uncover hidden risks and preserve your reputation. After all, your vendors’ actions could significantly impact your company’s reputation.
The scope of vendor due diligence process continues to evolve, adapting to the ever-changing business landscape.
For example, one critical development is the incorporation of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations into vendor due diligence. ESG factors have become a significant part of vendor risk assessments, as they can impact operational, regulatory, and reputational factors. From managing natural resources to observing ethical labor practices, these factors can significantly influence a vendor’s reputation and operational efficiency.
Another crucial expansion of vendor due diligence is data protection. With regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA becoming more stringent, businesses are emphasizing vendor due diligence to guard against breaches involving Personal Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
As the landscape of vendor risk management continues to evolve, it is incumbent upon organizations to similarly evolve their approach to vendor due diligence to keep pace with these changes.
Conducting vendor due diligence has a variety of approaches. Depending on your internal expertise, resources, and risk priorities, you can opt for in-house, outsourced, or hybrid strategies for vendor due diligence.
In-house vendor due diligence allows you to verify the vendor’s claims directly; identifying unethical practices and verifying regulatory compliance. On the other hand, outsourcing the process leverages external expertise, freeing up your internal resources to focus on risk mitigation.
Hybrid strategies offer the best of both worlds, combining in-house, shared, and outsourced methods for a comprehensive risk management program. This approach ensures a tailored and robust risk management plan that suits your organization’s unique needs.
Vendor risk is just one piece of the puzzle. See how you can build a cohesive compliance and risk strategy.
Vendor due diligence is a key step in your procurement process. It is done at the start of a new vendor relationship, and continually, as an ongoing best practice:
A vendor due diligence questionnaire should include:
This checklist guides the sales process of conducting comprehensive and consistent evaluations of prospective vendors and understanding any inherent risk in working with these organizations.
Financial due diligence forms another crucial part of the checklist. It involves reviewing the vendor’s financial information, including:
This is done to assess their financial stability. Publicly traded companies should be monitored through quarterly filings, while private companies should regularly provide financial reports for ongoing financial transparency.
Lastly, the checklist should also include:
Adopting a risk-based approach is a critical component of effective vendor due diligence. This involves assessing the types and severity of risks posed by vendors prior to selection and onboarding.
To facilitate this, effective vendor relationships can be categorized into tiers, with more resources and efforts focused on high-risk vendors. This ensures that the greatest potential harm to the business is addressed first, aided by the use of vendor risk intelligence networks.
In addition to the items listed in the previous section, robust due diligence for high-risk vendors can include:
Continuous monitoring and open communication between relevant internal stakeholders, such as procurement, legal, and IT departments, are also crucial for consistency in adopting and adapting a risk-based due diligence approach.
As already mentioned, it’s essential to extend the process of managing vendor risks beyond initial due diligence. Continuous monitoring is a strategic discipline that ensures vendors meet performance expectations and that potential risks are proactively identified and mitigated.
Monitoring techniques may include:
Disaster recovery plans, employee training protocols, and due diligence conducted on subcontractors should also be part of operational risk assessments.
Real-time risk intelligence plays a crucial role in risk management. For instance, a technology company that proactively monitors vendor cybersecurity may be able to avoid a data breach, illustrating the value of real-time risk intelligence in better risk management outcomes.
Automated third-party risk management platforms can streamline vendor due diligence processes, as they offer:
Moreover, an automated vendor management program offers the following benefits in terms of vendor risk management:
Thoropass can help! With our thorough risk assessment, fast certifications, and automated workflow audits, we strive to make staying within compliance as easy as possible. Speak to a member of our team today to learn more or request your demo.
Adequate due diligence plays a crucial role in assessing third-party vendors, ensuring informed decision-making, risk management, compliance, and operational efficiency. From understanding the expanding scope of vendor due diligence requirements to leveraging technology and automation, organizations can better equip themselves to navigate the challenges of vendor due diligence and reap the benefits of effective vendor management.
So, as you continue to grow and onboard new vendors, remember that the due diligence process is not a mere formality. It’s a critical tool that safeguards your organization’s reputation, financial stability, and operational efficiency. Embrace the process, leverage technology, and stay ahead of potential risk.
When performing due diligence on vendors, consider six core areas: General company information, financial review, reputational risk, insurance, information security technical review, and policy review. This will ensure a thorough vetting process.
Vendor due diligence, such as Vendor Due Diligence (VDD), is important as it enables informed decision-making, effective risk management, compliance, and operational efficiency when assessing third-party vendors.
In recent years, the scope of vendor due diligence has expanded to encompass Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors, complex supply chains, data protection regulations, and broader aspects like manufacturing and business continuity. This expansion reflects the evolving landscape of vendor risk management.
Buyer due diligence happens when a potential buyer investigates a company or asset they’re interested in purchasing. It’s all about assessing risks, opportunities, and potential benefits from the buyer’s perspective. On the flip side, vendor due diligence is done by the seller before putting their business or asset up for sale. It’s about preparing the company for sale by addressing any issues upfront and providing comprehensive information to potential buyers.
Timing-wise, buyer due diligence comes after expressing interest, while vendor due diligence happens before the sale. In terms of control, buyers lead their due diligence, while sellers take charge of vendor due diligence. Despite these differences, both processes are crucial for smoothing out the sale process and ensuring informed decisions on both sides.
Note: This post was originally published in June 2022 and first updated on May 4, 2024. It has since been updated, revised, and reviewed by internal experts
Oro provides content designed to educate and help audiences on their compliance journey.
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A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a strategic blueprint organizations create to ensure they can continue operating during and after a disruptive event. It is a comprehensive document outlining how a business will continue to function during an emergency, such as a natural disaster, a cyber attack, or any other event interrupting normal business operations.
Our guide offers a detailed example to help you understand how to sustain operations during unexpected events. Straightforward and actionable, this resource is designed for you to adapt and apply to your own company’s needs—ensuring your business weathers interruptions with minimal impact.
A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a thorough guide that delineates the procedures a company will follow to ensure uninterrupted operation in the face of emergencies such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, or other potential operational disturbances.
The goal of a business continuity plan is to minimize disruption and ensure that the business can maintain critical functions or quickly resume them after an incident. It includes identifying essential personnel, processes, and technologies needed to keep the business running, as well as strategies for handling various types of emergencies.
A well-crafted BCP is proactive, laying out guidelines in advance for decision-makers to follow during a crisis, thereby reducing hasty or ill-informed decisions that could exacerbate the situation. It also involves training employees, establishing communication protocols, and regularly testing and updating the plan to ensure its effectiveness.
In essence, a business continuity plan acts as a life vest for the company, providing the necessary support to keep the business afloat and operational during turbulent times.
Although the terms disaster recovery and business continuity are sometimes used synonymously, they represent specific roles within an organization. To gain a clearer understanding of these differences, we should explore how they integrate into your larger business continuity plan framework.
Business continuity plans are designed to sustain operations amid a crisis, serving to protect and keep the business running even in trying times.
A disaster recovery plan is more focused on the aftermath. It concentrates on reestablishing data accessibility and reconstructing IT frameworks after a catastrophe. It lays out methods aimed at regaining complete operational capacity in the aftermath of such an event. In the face of disruptions like cyber assaults or power failures, an expertly devised disaster recovery strategy is pivotal in enabling your business to recover with speed and effectiveness.
Incorporating disaster recovery strategies within your business continuity plan guarantees extensive protection throughout emergencies. This integration is critical for ensuring your business maintains its ability to function regardless of the circumstances.
Business continuity plans can contain a variety of focus areas within an organization. Each type of plan serves a unique purpose and addresses different aspects of business operations that are crucial for resilience in the face of adversity. Here are eight distinct focus areas a business continuity plans can include that are common within different organizations.
This type of plan details the procedures for keeping the company’s core functions running, including the management of day-to-day activities and logistics. It ensures that the operational aspects, from production lines to customer service, can continue or quickly resume, minimizing downtime and financial impact.
Technological disruptions can cripple an organization. A technological or IT continuity plan outlines the steps to prevent and recover from tech-related interruptions, such as system failures, cyber-attacks, or data loss. It includes implementing robust IT infrastructure, data backup protocols, and quick-response IT teams to safeguard and restore technology assets, ensuring the digital backbone of the business remains intact. The highlighting of potential technological threats along with a detailed action plan, can be documented in something called a business continuity and disaster recovery plan (BCDR).
An economic continuity plan addresses the financial resilience of a business in the face of economic downturns or market instabilities. It involves strategies for financial risk management, cost control, and liquidity maintenance to ensure the company can withstand and recover from economic challenges while safeguarding its financial health and competitive position.
The workforce continuity plan ensures that a business can function with minimal disruption in the event of issues affecting its workforce, such as health epidemics or personnel shortages. This plan includes cross-training employees, establishing remote work capabilities, and creating policies that support employee well-being and productivity during crises.
A safety continuity plan is essential for preserving the well-being of employees and customers during emergencies. It includes health and safety guidelines, emergency response procedures, and evacuation plans. This plan prioritizes the prevention of accidents and injuries, as well as the swift and effective response to any safety incidents that occur.
Environmental threats, such as natural disasters or climate change effects, require an environmental continuity plan. This plan involves strategies for protecting assets against environmental risks, ensuring regulatory compliance, and promoting sustainable practices. It includes measures to minimize environmental impact and facilitate a rapid recovery from environmental disruptions. This will be documented in the BCDR as well.
The security continuity plan is dedicated to protecting the physical and informational assets of a company from threats like theft, vandalism, espionage, and terrorism. It encompasses access controls, surveillance systems, and incident response protocols. This plan is crucial for maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of business operations and sensitive data.
A company’s reputation is one of its most valuable assets. The reputation continuity plan focuses on managing and mitigating risks to the business’s public image and brand perception. It includes crisis communication strategies, public relations tactics, and customer engagement plans to address and rectify any issues that could harm the company’s reputation, ensuring long-term trust and loyalty from stakeholders.
As we’ve shown above, there are different business focus areas, and your business may need some or all of these to operate with resilience and foresight. Still, no matter what the focus of your business continuity plan, it should be straightforward and functional. It must include key elements such as up-to-date emergency contacts, defined recovery strategies, and specific action plans for various emergencies.
While each area may have unique components tailored to the business, the following foundational elements are vital for an effective response to disruptions.
A business continuity plan must clearly define its objectives, taking into account the available resources and the potential financial impacts. The main aim is to minimize financial losses, which is vital for the business’s survival during difficult times.
At the same time, ensuring customer satisfaction is paramount, as is maintaining essential operations and safeguarding employee welfare. With these objectives in mind, the plan outlines a clear direction for sustained resilience.
When formulating a business continuity plan, it is crucial to identify and prioritize critical functions. These functions are essential for maintaining day-to-day operations and ensuring key services remain uninterrupted during a disruption. This includes vital operations such as IT services, which are responsible for managing important data, and supply chain management, which ensures necessary materials are available for production.
For instance, your customer support department may be considered a critical service. In the event of a cyberattack compromising the company’s main communication channels, the business continuity plan would outline alternative methods of communication, such as secondary email systems or emergency hotlines, enabling the customer support team to continue addressing client inquiries and maintaining service levels.
Each business component, no matter how small, plays a significant role in the overall functionality of the organization. Therefore, every part of the company, from the IT department to logistics, must be considered when developing a comprehensive business continuity plan to preserve the organization’s operations against adversity.
In any Business Continuity Plan (BCP), clarity in assigning roles and responsibilities is paramount. This ensures when an emergency unfolds, there is clarity about who needs to do what, thereby streamlining the response and recovery process. Each role within the BCP should be clearly defined, along with its responsibilities. For instance, it is essential to designate an individual or a team responsible for declaring a disaster. This role is critical as it initiates the execution of the BCP.
Similarly, the plan should outline who is in charge of communicating with relevant authorities, such as reporting a data breach to cybersecurity agencies or coordinating with emergency services. The timing for these communications is often crucial and can have significant legal or regulatory implications; therefore, the plan should specify any required timeframes for reporting incidents.
To ensure all team members can be reached without delay, the BCP must include up-to-date contact information for all individuals with assigned responsibilities. This contact list should be regularly verified and updated, and it should be easily accessible to all members of the continuity planning team. It is also advisable to establish a hierarchy or chain of command within the plan to provide clear guidance on who takes over if the primary person responsible is unavailable.
You may be tempted to download a handy template and start plugging in information in order to develop a business continuity plan. But there’s more to business continuity management than simply filling out a form. These plans transcend mere paperwork. To guarantee a robust approach to your business continuity plan, you need to work through a systematic approach, involving everything from conducting risk assessments to devising recovery strategies—essential elements providing the backbone of an effective continuity plan.
Begin the creation of your business continuity plan by forming a specialized team. This group will take on the crucial tasks of:
Ensure this team reflects the diversity of expertise across your company by including representatives from various departments who possess detailed knowledge about different aspects of business operations.
Upon gathering your team, the next step is to execute a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). This process
functions analogously to how a scout would inspect their domain, with the BIA enabling you to:
Through its ability to detect, measure, and assess the repercussions associated with a shortfall or cessation in operations, a BIA delivers an explicit understanding of potential risks. It aids in strategizing resource allocation when faced with emergencies.
Mitigation strategies and risk assessments are the cornerstone of your continuity plan for business operations. They serve as the proactive elements, pinpointing possible hazards such as cyber threats, natural calamities, or interruptions in the supply chain while evaluating how they may affect vital processes and charting a course toward protection.
Safeguarding your enterprise is not solely about threat recognition. It equally involves bolstering your protective measures – from ensuring the security of your physical workplace to enhancing cybersecurity protocols. Possessing thorough mitigation strategies and risk evaluations equips you with an advantage on the journey toward formulating an unyielding business continuity strategy.
Protecting your critical systems and assets is akin to safeguarding your most valuable possessions. The objective is to guarantee essential business functions, encompassing internal systems or elements of the supply chain, maintain their operations amidst challenging situations. Strategies for this continuity could range from activating alternate backup systems to broadening the diversity within your supply chain.
With a clear understanding of the potential impacts, it’s time to develop your recovery strategies. These are the plans to guide your business through the storm, ensuring your operations continue with minimal disruption. Some key strategies to consider include:
These business continuity strategies form the backbone of your business continuity plan.
And remember, a business continuity plan is a living document. Regular updates are crucial to keeping it aligned with technological, regulatory, and market changes.
Phew! Now, you have a business continuity plan. Congratulations! But that doesn’t mean you can move on and forget the process, with documentation gathering dust in folders. Maintaining a business continuity plan is an active, continuous process. It necessitates routine management to guarantee its efficacy as new threats arise and the business conditions evolve.
To ensure your continuity plan remains both effective and pertinent, it’s essential to delve into practices such as periodic revisions and updates. In particular, training and testing protocols are paramount.
Ensuring your team is well-prepared to execute a disaster recovery plan is paramount, as the success of any plan hinges on the competence and readiness of those carrying it out. It’s essential to engage in routine disaster recovery exercises and practice scenarios to ensure everyone understands their duties and can perform them adeptly during an emergency.
Regular drills serve to pinpoint weaknesses within the plan and to actively maintain its details in your team’s memory, thereby guaranteeing they are primed for prompt response when faced with a disaster.
Business continuity planning is the process of preparing your business to face unforeseen disruptions effectively. It’s about being proactive and ready for anything, from natural disasters to cyber threats. The process involves assembling a team with diverse skills, analyzing the impact of potential business disruptions, and developing strategies to keep your business running smoothly.
Thoropass can streamline your entire compliance process by combining smart automation and expert guidance. We also offer a breadth of services as part of our Partner Ecosystem. So whether you’re simply looking for a single source of truth to manage all aspects of your compliance program or hands-on help building things like a business continuity plan, we have a solution for you. With a robust business continuity plan as part of your overall compliance program, you’re not just building a fortress against threats, but also equipping it with advanced security technology.
A Business Continuity Plan serves as a strategic outline designed to ensure the business can maintain or quickly restore its critical operations during interruptions, including natural disasters or technological breakdowns.
Essential components of a business continuity plan include emergency contact information, an action strategy for recovery, and detailed action plans. These elements are critical to facilitate an effective response to any disturbances affecting the normal operations of a business.
To maintain its efficacy and relevance, it is recommended your Business Continuity Plan undergo a review and update at least biannually or annually due to the speed in which technology advances.
In simple terms, DRP is a subset of a BCP.
A Business Continuity Plan is designed to sustain business functions with minimal disruption in the face of significant disturbances, unlike a Disaster Recovery Plan, which concentrates on reestablishing access to data and rebuilding IT infrastructure following a disaster.
Thus, while managing IT systems is at the heart of a Disaster Recovery Plan, maintaining broader aspects of business operations falls under the scope of a Business Continuity Plan.
To evaluate the consequences interruptions could have on critical business functions, a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is performed. This analysis determines both the tolerable length of downtime and the necessary resources to maintain business continuity.
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There are many threats to your normal business operations: Those threats can include everything from a natural disaster that causes unexpected power interruptions to the ever-present threat of cyber attacks. Add to this the fact that customers expect maximum uptime from your systems, and you’ve got the recipe for a potentially difficult business environment.
But it is possible to survive and even thrive. A bulletproof BCDR (business continuity and disaster recovery) plan that defines your vulnerabilities and provides guidelines on how to minimize their effects is vital to your organization’s resilience. In this blog post, we’ll cover why BCDR is so important and the steps you can take to develop and execute one properly.
BCDR serves as a strategic shield for your business operations, protecting against known possible disasters (and anticipating otherwise unforeseen ones) and guaranteeing the uninterrupted provision of essential functions.
BCDR is also a dynamic concept, constantly evolving and expanding its focus on business resilience, particularly emphasizing operational resilience as a key organizational asset. Simply put, BCDR planning is like the roots of a tree, providing a foundation for the organization to withstand storms and continue to grow.
Building a robust BCDR framework involves:
Identifying critical business functions is essential for the continuity of your business during a disruption. These functions are the backbone of your company, necessary for maintaining operations and ensuring survival in the face of adversity. They encompass a range of resources, such as business data, skilled personnel, facilities, supplies, information technology, and relationships with goods and service providers.
Recognizing the interdependencies between these critical functions is also crucial. It’s about understanding how different areas of your business are connected and affect one another. This perspective is vital when analyzing information from the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), as it helps to consider how different areas within the organization rely on each other and share common requirements.
Setting recovery objectives involves determining the specific goals for your business’s recovery process, including:
By establishing clear recovery objectives, you ensure that your business is ready to face disruptions and can reduce the negative effects on your operations.
The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) helps you understand what you need to meet these objectives, like how much downtime is acceptable and how much data loss can be tolerated. It’s important to communicate the specifics of RPO and RTO to everyone involved in the recovery process, including IT staff and service providers.
Recovery Time Objective Your RTO or Recovery Time Objective is the maximum acceptable amount of time for restoring a network or application and regaining access to data after an unplanned disruption. An RTO is measured in terms of time to recover (seconds, minutes, hours, or days.) It is an important consideration in a disaster recovery plan (DRP).
Your RTO or Recovery Time Objective is the maximum acceptable amount of time for restoring a network or application and regaining access to data after an unplanned disruption.
An RTO is measured in terms of time to recover (seconds, minutes, hours, or days.) It is an important consideration in a disaster recovery plan (DRP).
Maximum Tolerable Downtime MTD or Maximum Tolerable Downtime is the total amount of time the organization can accept for a system/process outage or disruption and includes all impact considerations. Loss of revenue and the extent to which a disrupted process impacts business continuity can both have an impact on MTD. It can be calculated by adding up the total amount of time it takes to successfully execute each step to bring the business back and recover from a disaster. Since each of these steps needs to be adjusted properly and requires the specific tools and the right permissions, it can take some time to configure ahead of time.
MTD or Maximum Tolerable Downtime is the total amount of time the organization can accept for a system/process outage or disruption and includes all impact considerations. Loss of revenue and the extent to which a disrupted process impacts business continuity can both have an impact on MTD. It can be calculated by adding up the total amount of time it takes to successfully execute each step to bring the business back and recover from a disaster. Since each of these steps needs to be adjusted properly and requires the specific tools and the right permissions, it can take some time to configure ahead of time.
Steps can include:
For example, if an outage occurs at midnight and it takes until 6:00 am to complete each step to become fully operational again, the recovery time is six hours. Comparing this length of time to existing service level agreements (SLAs) will allow the organization to see if its processes and efforts are efficient or need to be improved.
Recovery Point Objective Your RPO, on the other hand, is the maximum amount of data loss after a disruption that your organization can manage before data loss is simply irrecoverable. This metric tells you how resilient your organization would be against a cyberattack that breaches sensitive information. It is expressed as the amount of time that you have to recover data. For example, if a backup occurs at noon, 12:30 pm, and 1:00 pm, your RPO is set at 30 minutes. A backup occurs every 30 minutes, and any data lost within the half-hour time frame is manageable.
While it is good to calculate your RTO and RPO ahead of time, you will want to put your infrastructure through some stress tests to determine whether or not it is equipped to handle a sudden, unexpected event. This can involve on-site and off-site data centers as well as a number of different kinds of backups, including full backups, incremental backups, and differential backups.
While both Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are essential components of a disaster recovery business continuity plan, they each have their unique focus within the broader scope of business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR).
Think of it like the two sides of the same coin. Business continuity planning ensures that critical business operations such as operational procedures, staffing, and supply chain management can continue during and immediately after a disruptive event. Incorporating business continuity plans into your organization’s strategy is crucial for maintaining continuous business operations and resilience in the face of unforeseen challenges.
On the other side of the coin, disaster recovery focuses on the restoration of IT systems and data after a disruption. It’s like the medical team that rushes in to perform the necessary procedures to restore normalcy after a health crisis.
Your organization’s risk management strategy should seamlessly blend both business continuity and disaster recovery plans, including disaster recovery strategies, due to their complementary nature and collective effectiveness.
Every BCDR plan undergoes a lifecycle, necessitating constant updates, frequent risk reassessment, testing, and audits to verify its effectiveness and relevance to the organization’s changing needs.
Within BCDR, audits (more commonly referred to as tests) are essential for checking the effectiveness of business continuity management. Regular tests of the business continuity plan (BCP) make sure that all parts of the plan work as they should and meet the company’s standards.
Tests offer clear feedback and suggest improvements. Companies can choose to use their own staff for testing, as they know the business well, or bring in outside testers for an unbiased view. Decisions about who conducts the test, the extent of the test, and how the plan is kept up to date are important for making sure the test is useful.
The effectiveness of a BCDR plan relies not only on the outlined strategies but also on the personnel tasked with implementing these strategies. Comprehensive training programs to clarify each employee’s responsibilities during disaster events are integral to successful BCDR strategies.
But it’s not just about training; it’s also about empowering your recovery personnel. Engaging team members in business continuity education and certification programs equips them with best practices knowledge to implement BCDR strategies. Furthermore, maintaining frequent communication about BCDR training reinforces its significance and encourages stakeholder engagement.
A fundamental aspect of BCDR planning is forestalling catastrophic damage to your business resulting from natural disasters. Implementing preventative measures, such as hardware and software redundancy, can help prevent outages and data loss during disaster events. Ensuring data protection is also a crucial part of these measures.
Additionally, securing against data breaches and utilizing backup solutions, such as cloud services, are key preventive strategies in BCDR planning. New technologies, including cloud computing and AI, present opportunities for better disaster preparedness, while observing industry best practices for data management helps maintain alignment with these advancements.
BCDR planning presents its own set of challenges. However, these obstacles can be overcome with strategic planning and prudent decision-making. Identifying and prioritizing essential expenses, and focusing on critical resources crucial for recovery operations, can help overcome budget constraints in BCDR planning.
Moreover, maintaining detailed records of BCDR-related expenditures is critical for regular monitoring and optimization of expenses. Implementing a change control process ensures that alterations to the BCDR plan are necessary and managed effectively to minimize cost impact.
In the current digital age, technology significantly contributes to the enhancement of BCDR. Adopting cloud-based services can increase data availability, allowing for quick failover if one data center goes down, thereby supporting scaling according to need.
Furthermore, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provides a comprehensive recovery solution, while Cloud Backup ensures data backup and fast restores to maintain operations. For instance, Gaille Media, during Hurricane Harvey, leveraged cloud storage and remote work capabilities to keep their operations uninterrupted.
If you aren’t sure what steps to take, speak to an expert on how you can get started today.
A meticulously designed BCDR plan is not a standalone entity but a strategic instrument that aligns with the organization’s overarching objectives. Informed BCDR investment decisions can be aided by estimates from business leaders across corporate disciplines regarding the expected costs of disparate types of disruptive events.
Moreover, service-level agreements (SLAs) in a BCDR plan set quality standards for recovery services, ensuring they meet predefined performance criteria. Thus, aligning BCDR with organizational goals ensures that the continuity strategy supports the overarching mission and vision of the organization.
Regulatory compliance is a key component in BCDR. Compliance with standards like ISO guides the formulation of BCDR strategies, guaranteeing alignment with industry best practices.
Furthermore, understanding regulatory requirements for critical business functions is crucial as some functions may need to be prioritized to fulfill these standards. Audit frameworks like ISO provide structured methodologies for businesses to validate their continuity plans against recognized industry practices and controls.
BCDR planning is a strategic linchpin for any organization, ensuring business continuity and resilience in the face of unforeseen disruptions.
From identifying critical business functions, setting recovery objectives, leveraging technology, and aligning with organizational goals, each aspect of BCDR plays a crucial role in safeguarding business operations. With proactive planning, diligent execution, and regular audits, BCDR ensures that your organization stands resilient in the face of adversity.
Note: This article was originally published on May 17, 2023, and updated on March 14, 2024, which included optimization and SME reviews.
BCDR stands for “business continuity and disaster recovery,” and it refers to a set of practices that help an organization continue or recover business operations in the event of a disaster.
BCP stands for Business Continuity Plan, which is a document outlining how a business will continue operating during an unplanned disruption in service. It includes a plan for workspaces, telephones, workstations, servers, applications, network connections, and any other resources required in the business process.
DRP stands for Disaster Recovery Plan, which is a document outlining how a business restores platforms, systems, and/or data during an emergency event. It includes a step-by-step plan to recover technical systems back to their original state.
BCDR is significant as it safeguards business operations against disasters, ensuring the continuity of essential functions and enhancing business resilience.
Recovery objectives, such as RTO and RPO, are established in BCDR planning by considering factors like downtime impact, financial costs, regulatory requirements, and service level agreements.
Technology enhances BCDR by decentralizing data storage, increasing availability, reducing the impact of service disruption attacks, and eliminating the need for expensive physical mirror sites. This allows for more efficient and effective business continuity and disaster recovery plans.
The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a critical tool designed to help organizations identify and address potential disruptions before they wreak havoc. Think of a BIA as a framework for evaluating the potential effects of disruptions on your business operations.
It examines how hiccups might impact your essential business processes, resources, and recovery strategies, while the business impact analysis report serves as the key outcome of the BIA process. One way to gather the necessary information for a BIA is through a business impact analysis questionnaire.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the ins and outs of BIA, its importance, and how to effectively conduct one to ensure your business remains resilient and prepared for the unexpected.
The BIA delves into your organization’s vital components, such as the apps supporting critical business processes, interconnected systems, and potential breakdowns, revealing the possible effects of a disaster on your business functions over time. This crucial insight enables you to establish plans, priorities, and timelines for recovery while considering factors like lost sales, delayed income, increased expenses, and regulatory fines.
The rationale behind businesses allocating time and resources to conduct a BIA is straightforward: it fosters preparedness, reduces risk, and safeguards business continuity. When organizations comprehend the operational and financial impacts of disruptions, they are better positioned to identify and prioritize their essential business functions and resources and set suitable recovery timelines.
Moreover, a comprehensive BIA helps businesses determine the human and technology resources needed for recovery. This proactive approach enables organizations to stay ahead of potential emergencies and minimize risks, ensuring they can continue operating effectively even in the face of unforeseen challenges.
Despite their similarities, BIA, risk assessment, and disaster recovery planning each serve unique roles in protecting your business. Here’s how they differ:
Disaster recovery planning, on the other hand, is all about restoring systems and data after a disruption. Thus, BIA plays a crucial role in informing the senior management’s decision-making process, ensuring that appropriate recovery strategies are implemented across all levels of the organization.
While every business is unique and needs its own unique analysis, there are some common examples of business disruptions, including:
Effective mitigation strategies involve careful planning, prioritization, and implementation of appropriate measures. By anticipating potential disruption scenarios and developing targeted response plans, your organization can minimize the consequences of these events and maintain business continuity. Remember, the key to resilience is being prepared to face any challenge that comes your way.
Developing a BIA template is essential for streamlining the analysis process and ensuring a comprehensive approach. A typical template includes components such as:
These components enable businesses to thoroughly evaluate the potential impacts of disruptions on their operations and identify the necessary steps for recovery. Creating an effective disaster recovery plan (DRP, sometimes referred to as a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan, based on the BIA template equips organizations to handle any arising challenges and lessen the impact of unforeseen events.
Are you prepared to embark on the BIA process? This guide will lead you through the stages of:
Let’s break down each of these steps in more detail.
To kick off the BIA process, you’ll need to assemble a diverse project team with representatives from various departments, such as:
Each team member will play a crucial role in providing relevant information and insights, ensuring a comprehensive approach to the analysis.
For instance, when a multidisciplinary team of experts collaborates, your organization can more effectively pinpoint and manage potential risks and vulnerabilities. Each department brings its own expertise and perspective to the table. For example:
By working together, these departments can create a comprehensive risk management strategy that covers all aspects of your organization’s operations.
Once you’ve got a project team in place, it’s time to collect information about your critical business processes and potential impacts. This is typically done through interviews, questionnaires, and consultations with stakeholders.
Sample questionnaire questions For instance, your questionnaire might include questions such as: What are the key business processes in your department? What resources (people, systems, other assets) are required to perform these processes? How long can your department function without these processes? What would be the impact on the company if these processes were disrupted? Are there any dependencies between these processes and others within the company? What are the potential risks that could disrupt these processes? What recovery strategies are currently in place?
For instance, your questionnaire might include questions such as:
During this process, you’ll inventory the important business processes, resources, and dependencies, ensuring that your BIA is comprehensive and thorough.
In addition to gathering quantitative data, it’s essential to conduct qualitative interviews with individuals who possess detailed knowledge of your organization’s processes and operations.
Once you’ve collected the necessary data, the next step is to review and analyze it to:
This process involves assessing the potential risks and issues that could affect your business, allowing you to make informed decisions about the most effective recovery strategies.
A meticulous examination of the collected data provides a clear understanding of the possible financial and operational impacts of disruptions on your organization. This knowledge will enable you to develop targeted recovery plans that address the specific needs of your business, ensuring that you are well-prepared for any challenges that may arise.
With your findings and analysis at hand, the next step is to draft a comprehensive BIA report documenting potential impacts, recovery strategies, and recommendations.
This report serves as the key outcome of the BIA process and provides valuable information to guide your organization’s decision-making. The BIA report should include an overview of key activities, requirements, and risks, as well as suggestions for risk treatment.
By presenting this information to senior management, you can ensure that your organization is equipped with the necessary knowledge and resources to effectively address potential disruptions and maintain business continuity.
Upon completion of the BIA report, the final step is to implement its recommendations.
This process involves developing a plan, allocating resources, and monitoring progress to ensure that your organization successfully implements the recommended recovery strategies and mitigates potential risks.
However, while this may count as the last step, it’s important to remember that the BIA and business continuity plan are not static documents. As your organization evolves and faces new challenges, it’s crucial to regularly revisit and modify these plans to ensure they remain relevant and effective. By staying proactive and adaptive, your organization can continue to thrive in the face of uncertainty.
Technology can be a powerful ally in the BIA process and business continuity planning. Utilizing compliance operations applications and project management software can simplify the BIA process and help maintain an orderly, current business continuity plan.
In addition to simplifying the BIA process, technology can also provide valuable insights and information to inform your decision-making. Some ways technology can help include:
By leveraging technology, your organization can remain prepared for any disruptions that may arise.
Frequent review and updating of your BIA and business continuity plan are vital in keeping them relevant and effective in addressing your organization’s changing needs and risks. By staying current with industry trends, regulatory requirements, and emerging threats, you can ensure that your plans continue to provide the necessary protection and guidance.
Don’t wait for a disruption to strike before realizing the importance of maintaining an up-to-date BIA and business continuity plan. By proactively addressing potential risks and challenges, you can ensure that your organization remains resilient in the face of uncertainty and continues to thrive in a dynamic and competitive landscape.
Conducting a thorough Business Impact Analysis is an essential step in ensuring the resilience and continuity of your organization.
By understanding the potential impacts of disruptions on your critical business operations, assembling a diverse project team, and implementing recommended recovery strategies, your organization can effectively minimize risks and maintain business continuity in the face of uncertainty. Don’t leave your organization’s future to chance; take control by proactively investing in a comprehensive BIA and business continuity plan.
A BIA is an essential part of risk management, with its three primary goals being the identification, assessment, and response of potential disruptions. It allows organizations to measure the impact of disruptions on their operations, allowing them to prepare and respond appropriately.
A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) outlines the steps to take in case of an outage, while a BIA identifies the risks that could cause it and which business functions are most critical to prioritize for recovery.
A BIA template includes process description, priority ranking, impact category, inputs/outputs, resources/tools, process users, loss description/amount, recovery timeline, and strategy, helping organizations prepare for potential business disruption.
Businesses should be prepared for disruption scenarios such as accidents, machine malfunctions, cyberattacks, and natural disasters.
Note: This post was originally published on May 15, 2023, and has since been reviewed by internal subject matter experts and updated
In the ever-changing landscape of cybersecurity threats, how can businesses stay one step ahead of potential risks and protect their valuable data? Enter continuous security management (CSM)—a proactive approach to cyber and information security that ensures a robust security posture by monitoring, detecting, and responding to security threats in real time.
In this post, we delve into the role of CSM, its critical constituents, and its advantages for contemporary businesses in tackling evolving cyber threats and cloud security challenges.
In today’s digital era, businesses face a multitude of security risks. With data breaches and cyberattacks becoming increasingly common, organizations need to be on their toes to protect their assets. CSM is a relevant security practice. It provides the capability to monitor the security status of an organization in real time and detect potential security threats. By identifying potential risks early and taking steps to reduce them, CSM helps organizations lower their security risk and improve their security posture.
However, implementing CSM is not without challenges. Some of the challenges include:
CSM equips organizations with automated tools and processes to pinpoint and handle data security risks through constant security data surveillance.
Not only does CSM keep systems and networks safe, but it also provides ongoing monitoring and analysis of security data, along with automated tools and processes to manage risk effectively.
This proactive approach to cybersecurity ensures that organizations can stay ahead of threats and minimize the potential damage caused by security incidents.
The key components of continuous cybersecurity monitoring include:
Real time monitoring enables organizations to continuously monitor their security posture and quickly identify any potential risks, such as forgotten identities or ones with excessive permissions. By implementing continuous security monitoring, organizations can further enhance their security measures, making continuous security monitoring important.
Automated remediation is another essential component of CSM. It ensures that any security issues are addressed promptly, allowing security teams to return to normal operations as quickly as possible. By amalgamating these core components, CSM offers an all-encompassing and anticipatory strategy for managing security risks and upholding a robust security posture.
Compliance management involves ensuring that the organization’s security measures are in line with the required standards and regulations. This could range from industry-specific regulations, such as HIPAA for healthcare and PCI DSS for payment card information, to general data protection regulations, such as GDPR.
In the context of CSM, compliance management means continuously monitoring and auditing the organization’s security controls and processes to ensure they meet these regulatory standards. This not only helps in avoiding potential fines and legal issues but also builds trust with customers and stakeholders by demonstrating the organization’s commitment to data security.
Moreover, compliance management in CSM also involves updating the organization’s security measures as regulations evolve, ensuring that the organization remains compliant even as standards change. This proactive approach to compliance helps organizations stay ahead of potential risks and protect their valuable data.
Understanding how to manage your risk as a business is an important element of getting and staying compliant with widely accepted information security frameworks.
Implementing CSM allows organizations to keep a constant eye on their security posture, identify potential risks, and mitigate them before they inflict substantial damage. Subsequent sections will discuss how CSM can aid businesses in confronting the challenges presented by evolving cyber threats and cloud security issues.
Businesses must stay on top of potential ever-evolving security threats and adapt their security strategies accordingly. One potential security threat that organizations face, among others, includes data breaches. Some other potential security threats are:
CSM helps businesses stay ahead of these emerging threats, providing them with the tools and processes needed to keep up with the ever-changing threat landscape. The risks of evolving cyber threats include:
To manage these risks, businesses must apply continuous security management, a process that includes establishing a secure foundation, incorporating automation, and scrutinizing features and functionality. This approach is essential for effective risk management.
Cloud security challenges that pose significant threats to businesses include:
CSM offers a solution to these challenges by addressing misconfigurations and excessive permissions, which are common issues in cloud environments. This proactive approach to cloud security enables businesses to maintain a strong organization’s security posture, even as the complexity of cloud environments continues to grow.
CSM helps organizations by:
Privilege escalation occurs when an attacker exploits a bug, design flaw, or configuration oversight in an operating system or software application to gain access and higher privileges than they are supposed to have (e.g., moving from a normal user to an administrator, to a super-administrator.)
CSM plays an instrumental role in averting privilege escalation by constantly overseeing permissions and notifying organizations when an individual has excessive access rights. By keeping a close eye on permissions and access controls, CSM helps organizations minimize the risk of compromised identities and privilege escalation, ensuring a secure environment for their valuable data.
Workloads, which encompass any program or application that runs on a computer, can be vulnerable to security threats if not properly protected. CSM helps secure workloads by detecting vulnerabilities and ensuring that proper access controls are in place.
By continuously monitoring workloads and addressing potential security issues, continuous security monitoring CSM enables organizations to maintain a secure environment and protect their critical information assets from unauthorized access.
Implementing CSM effectively requires a strategic approach that involves establishing a secure baseline, integrating automation, and evaluating features and functionality.
A secure baseline is a set of predefined security configurations, settings, and controls that are established as the starting point for an organization’s IT systems, applications, networks, and other digital assets. These baselines are designed to provide a foundation of security measures that aim to mitigate common security vulnerabilities and risks.
By establishing a secure baseline, organizations can detect misconfigurations and ensure consistent security standards across the organization. This helps in several ways:
However, it’s important to note that a secure baseline is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Different organizations and systems may have varying requirements based on their unique risk profiles, industry regulations, and business needs. Therefore, while a baseline provides a solid foundation, it should be tailored and updated as needed to suit the organization’s specific security goals.
Automation is the use of technology to perform tasks with minimal human input. In the context of CSM, integrating automation helps simplify remediation processes and enables organizations to stay on top of:
By incorporating automation into their CSM strategy, organizations can streamline their security management processes and ensure a swift response to any potential threats. This proactive approach to cybersecurity helps maintain a robust security posture in the face of evolving cyber threats and cloud security challenges.
Choosing the right CSM solution for your organization involves considering key factors, such as features and functionality, as well as cost and return on investment (ROI). By carefully evaluating these factors, organizations can select a CSM solution that meets their unique security needs and budget requirements.
When selecting a CSM solution, it’s important to evaluate its features and functionality to determine whether it aligns with your organization’s needs and provides appropriate security measures. Key features to consider include:
By selecting a CSM solution with comprehensive features, organizations can effectively protect their valuable data, maintain a strong security posture, and stay ahead of potential security threats and vulnerabilities.
In weighing the cost and potential ROI of a CSM solution, organizations should take into account:
It’s important to assess these factors to ensure that the chosen CSM solution fits within the organization’s budget and meets its security requirements.
By carefully considering the cost and potential ROI of a CSM solution, organizations can make an informed decision and select a solution that provides the optimal balance of cost, features, and functionality.
Whether you’re ensuring that you have continuous monitoring to keep risk at bay or are exploring additional frameworks to open up new markets, it’s never too late to take another look at your compliance program. Learn more here or schedule a time to talk to an expert.
Continuous security is a comprehensive approach to security management that involves automating security monitoring, including vulnerability detection, cloud configurations, identities and entitlements, and data security. It aims to maintain a constant watch over the security of your system and protect against any potential risks or threats.
The three strategies for security management are information security management, network security management, and cybersecurity management, which combined provide a layered approach to protect business assets from potential threats.
Continuous monitoring in security is an approach that automates the constant monitoring of information security controls, vulnerabilities, and other cyber threats to detect potential problems and threats in real time. It provides organizations with the ability to identify and address any issues quickly.
By utilizing CSM, businesses can stay on top of the latest security threats and cloud challenges, ensuring their data is kept safe and secure. With CSM, businesses can be proactive in their security measures rather than reactive. They can identify potential threats before they become a problem and take steps to mitigate them.
CSM is an effective tool with three key components: real-time monitoring, automated remediation, and compliance management. Real-time monitoring allows organizations to detect and respond to security threats quickly. Automated remediation helps organizations quickly address security issues and reduce the risk of a breach.
“In banking or finance, trust is the only thing you have to sell.” Patrick Dixon
“In banking or finance, trust is the only thing you have to sell.”
Banking and finance is a key part of the modern economy, and ensuring the stability of financial institutions is paramount. But how do banks maintain their operations during unforeseen disruptions and crises?
The answer is robust Business Continuity Planning (BCP).
If you’re in banking or finance, you’ll know BCP is a critical component of any bank’s risk management strategy, and its importance cannot be overstated. In this post, we delve into the world of BCP in banking, highlighting its role and key components.
Business Continuity Planning is a proactive process designed to anticipate potential threats, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses. The BCP process bolsters a bank’s resilience during crises. It aims to reduce losses and maintain business operations despite disruptions.
Imagine a scenario where a major natural disaster or cyber attack impacts your bank’s operations, and you have no plan in place. The consequences could be dire, leading to financial loss, reputational damage, and regulatory non-compliance.
Banking’s BCP encompasses having an established plan, adhering to regulatory standards, and stabilizing financial markets. It encompasses a broader scope than Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) or Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan, which focuses solely on the technical aspects of recovering IT infrastructure and systems.
At its core, a thorough BCP in banking:
Banks are required to have a comprehensive BCP in place to address potential disruptions and ensure compliance with industry standards. This includes adhering to the ISO 22301:2019 standard, the global benchmark for business continuity management.
Adherence to these regulatory standards allows banks to show dedication to sustaining operations, customer service, and financial asset protection during disasters.
The modern financial system is a complex web of interconnected market participants and infrastructure service providers, including financial institutions such as:
As a result, the stability of the entire financial system hinges on the ability of each participant to maintain their operations during disruptions.
In this context, BCP in banking must consider the interconnectedness of financial market participants and infrastructure service providers to minimize systemic risks.
To develop a thorough BCP, banks need to gauge the prospective impacts of disruptions on the market, along with the geographic interdependencies that shape contemporary local, national, and global banking networks. This way, their BCP can tackle the distinct challenges presented by this interlinked financial environment, allowing them to persistently serve their customers and stabilize financial markets amidst considerable disruptions.
A significant business disruption can take many forms. Banks must address specific disruptions, such as natural disasters, cyber attacks, and pandemics, in their BCPs to ensure comprehensive coverage and preparedness. By considering these unique challenges, banks can develop targeted strategies and solutions that address the specific risks and vulnerabilities posed by each type of disruption.
The frequency and intensity of natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, etc.) are on the rise. While these pose a significant risk to habitat and humanity, they also cause significant disruptions to business operations, including banking. Banks, therefore, require contingency plans for physical damage, power outages, and disruptions to transportation and communication networks.
Banks can also use financial products, such as insurance, to address the financial risks of natural disasters. By having comprehensive plans in place to address the unique challenges posed by natural disasters, banks can minimize the impact on their customers and ensure the stability of the financial system during such events.
Cyber attacks and technological failures also pose significant threats to banks, as they can lead to data breaches, system outages, and financial loss. According to the IMF:
“The financial sector is particularly vulnerable to cyber-attacks. These institutions are attractive targets because of their crucial role in intermediating funds. A successful cyber-attack on one institution could spread rapidly through the highly interconnected financial system.”
To address these threats, banks must implement robust cybersecurity measures, such as firewalls, encryption software, and endpoint protection, to safeguard their IT infrastructure and systems from malicious actors.
In addition to cybersecurity measures, banks must also invest in data backup and recovery solutions to ensure the availability of their data and systems in the event of a cyber attack or technological failure. These solutions, coupled with comprehensive incident response plans, can help banks minimize the impact of cyber-attacks and technological failures on their operations and customers.
Pandemics (such as the COVID-19 outbreak) present unique challenges for banks, as they can lead to staff inaccessibility, remote work requirements, and health and safety concerns. To address these challenges, banks must establish plans for remote work, alternative staffing arrangements, and health and safety protocols to ensure the well-being of their employees and customers during such events.
Prioritizing employee well-being and safety allows banks to:
Business Continuity Planning is an important element of ISO 27001 compliance. Find out what it looks like for your organization.
So, how do you stay ahead of these disruptions? A well-rounded bank’s BCP consists of three key components:
Each component plays a crucial role in ensuring the bank’s ability to withstand disruptions and continue providing essential services to its customers. Let’s look at each in more detail.
Risk assessment and management is the first step in developing a comprehensive BCP for banks. It involves:
An efficient risk management process also requires frequent BCP updates to accommodate changes in the bank’s operations, threat scenarios, and audit suggestions. Continuous risk assessment and management allow banks to:
Technical recovery solutions focus on the restoration of IT infrastructure and systems during a disruption, ensuring the continuity of critical functions and contributing to business recovery. In today’s digital age, the resilience of a bank’s IT systems is of utmost importance, as even minor disruptions can have far-reaching consequences for the bank’s operations and customers.
To address this challenge, banks must invest in robust technical recovery solutions. These solutions not only help banks restore their core systems and data following a disruption but also provide the necessary tools for monitoring and managing their IT infrastructure, ensuring the highest level of resilience and preparedness.
Human resources and employee training are essential components of a bank’s BCP, as they ensure that employees are aware of their roles and responsibilities during a disruption and can effectively execute the plan. Training should incorporate emergency response drills, BCP procedure overviews, and periodic plan reviews to keep employees current and conversant with the processes.
Moreover, banks must invest in the well-being and safety of their employees, as they are the backbone of the organization. By providing access to mental health support, flexible work options, and clear health and safety guidelines, banks can create a supportive work environment that enables employees to perform at their best during disruptions and emergencies.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is an important aspect of BCP in banking, as it helps banks identify critical functions, assess the potential impact of disruptions, and set recovery time objectives to prioritize resources and efforts.
Executing an exhaustive BIA provides banks with valuable insights into their operations and weaknesses, which aids in the development of targeted recovery strategies and disruption impact minimization on customers and the financial system.
Critical business functions in banks (e.g., transaction processing or customer account services) are those that would have a disastrous effect on stakeholders or the bank if they were to fail.
Identifying these functions is crucial for determining which processes and systems must be prioritized for recovery during a disruption.
Concentrating on the most critical operation aspects enables banks to allocate resources and efforts effectively, thereby reducing the disruption impact on customers and financial system stability.
Recovery time objectives (RTOs) are a key component of the BIA process, as they help banks establish the maximum acceptable downtime for critical functions.
Setting RTOs involves assessing the:
Clear RTOs help banks steer recovery strategy development and ensure their readiness to handle disruptions promptly and effectively.
Examples of RTOs in banking include restoring core banking systems within 24 hours, gaining customer access within 48 hours, and resuming full operations within 72 hours. These objectives serve as benchmarks for banks to measure their progress and preparedness, helping them identify areas for improvement and adjust their BCP accordingly.
Implementing and testing a bank’s BCP is a structured process that involves regular maintenance and updates to ensure its effectiveness during a disruption. The process encompasses:
The BCP implementation process begins with the development of recovery strategies, which outline the specific actions and resources required to restore critical functions and systems following a disruption. These strategies should be based on the findings of the bank’s BIA and risk assessment, ensuring that they address the most significant threats and vulnerabilities.
Once recovery strategies have been developed, banks must assign roles and responsibilities to employees, outlining their duties during disruption and ensuring that they are trained and prepared to execute the BCP, which includes the disaster recovery plan. Establishing clear communication protocols is also essential, as it enables the bank to maintain effective coordination and information sharing during a disruption.
Regular testing and maintenance are critical to the success of a bank’s BCP, as they help identify weaknesses and areas for improvement, ensuring that the plan remains current and effective. Testing can involve various methods, including tabletop exercises, walkthroughs, and full-scale simulations. These exercises not only evaluate the plan’s viability but also assess the ability of employees and executives to handle stress and make decisions under pressure.
Alongside testing, regular BCP maintenance is vital to keep the plan updated and responsive to changes in the bank’s operations, threat scenarios, and audit suggestions. By conducting regular reviews and updates, banks can ensure that their BCP remains effective in addressing potential disruptions, thereby minimizing the impact on their customers and financial system’s stability.
By addressing potential threats, vulnerabilities, and disruptions, banks can ensure the continuity of operations, comply with regulatory requirements, and maintain the stability of financial markets.
A comprehensive BCP encompasses risk assessment and management, technical recovery solutions, human resources, and training, as well as business impact analysis to identify critical functions and set recovery time objectives. With proper planning, communication, and regular testing and maintenance, banks can be well-prepared to face any disruption and continue to serve their customers and support the financial system during challenging times.
Recommended reading
Gain comprehensive insights into ISO 27001, understand its pivotal role in enhancing data security, discover its strategic importance for business success, and learn the step-by-step path to certification.
Bad things happen. It may be difficult to anticipate all the possible scenarios that could disrupt your business, but we have witnessed a few examples in recent years: a global pandemic and a war in Eastern Europe, natural disasters like fires or flooding, and supply chain challenges. But challenges to your business continuity may also be close to home: Bad press, the tragic passing of a leader, or a security breach.
For these and many more scenarios, macro and micro, business continuity planning is an essential task for creating organizational resilience. And an organization’s ability to maintain essential functions during a crisis can set you apart.
Business continuity planning is best undertaken when you’re not in the midst of a critical event. Rather, it’s a set of actions and protocols a business puts in place for when such events might occur. Business continuity management (BCM) and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) are just two acronyms you may encounter.
In this blog post, we’ll break business continuity into three key components or three branches and walk you through examples of each:
This branch of business continuity focuses on the immediate response to a crisis or emergency situation. Think of it as a “to-do plan” if there’s a natural disaster, cyber-attack, or any other unexpected event that can disrupt business operations.
The primary objective of an emergency or disaster response plan is to ensure the safety of employees and minimize damage to your business property, information, and infrastructure.
Let’s say that an unexpected fire breaks out in an office building. The emergency response helps us prioritize the immediate actions that must be taken, such as: Evacuating employees, notifying emergency services, and minimizing damage to property, physical assets, and infrastructure.
In the case of a fire, there are certain things you’re expected to have in place in any business location: These include fire safety protocols, safety training, and having designated emergency exits and evacuation routes in place per the National Fire Protection Association.
During a pandemic, the Emergency Response Management branch of business continuity would focus on immediate response to the crisis. This could include immediately sending employees home, providing personal protective equipment (PPE), and implementing lockdowns or quarantines to limit the spread of the disease or conflict. The objective is to ensure the safety of individuals and minimize the impact on infrastructure and critical systems.
Once you’ve come to grips with the emergency at hand, you can begin to manage the situation. You’re not out of crisis mode yet, but you’ve stabilized things enough that you can move from reactiveness to active management.
Crisis management deals with the restoration of critical business functions after an interruption, including the recovery of data, systems, and operations. The objective is to ensure that business operations can be resumed as quickly as possible and minimize the impact of the disruption.
After the fire has been extinguished, the Business Recovery Planning branch of business continuity would focus on restoring critical business functions. This could include recovering data from damaged computers, repairing damaged infrastructure, and ensuring that employees have access to the necessary resources to keep working. For example, your organization might have backup systems in place to restore data and operations, and they may have a recovery team to manage the process.
After the initial emergency response, the Business Recovery Planning branch of business continuity would focus on restoring critical functions. For example, during a pandemic, businesses might shift to remote work or implement social distancing measures to keep operations running. As we saw during the COVID pandemic, your IT team may review your systems so that remote meetings can be facilitated, for example. Governments may also implement stimulus packages to support businesses and individuals affected by the crisis.
With the crisis now under control, you can start to rebuild. Whether you’re rebuilding infrastructure, recruiting new team members, or regaining customers’ trust, this stage is about getting your business back to where it was.
But you shouldn’t forget the experience and lessons you learned. This branch also focuses on the proactive measures that organizations can take to mitigate the impact of another potential disaster or crisis (fingers crossed, no time soon!)
Disaster recovery planning includes risk assessment and risk management, developing contingency plans, and establishing procedures and protocols for responding to emergencies. The objective is to reduce the likelihood and severity of a disruption to business operations again.
A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a critical component of disaster recovery. The purpose of a BIA is to identify and prioritize critical business functions and processes, and determine the potential impact of disruptions to those functions.
By performing a BIA, organizations can identify which functions and processes are most critical to their operations and prioritize recovery efforts accordingly. The BIA provides the foundation for developing recovery strategies that address specific impacts on critical business processes and functions, such as loss of revenue, damage to reputation, regulatory non-compliance, and customer service disruptions.
In essence, the BIA helps to inform the development of a business recovery plan that outlines the steps necessary to recover critical business functions in the event of a disruption. This plan can include strategies for alternative work arrangements, backup systems, data recovery, and other measures aimed at minimizing the impact of a disruption on the organization.
The Disaster Preparedness Planning branch of business continuity would focus on proactive measures to mitigate the impact of potential disasters.
Your organization might conduct risk assessments and develop contingency plans for a broader set of natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes. You may also establish protocols for communicating with employees, suppliers, and customers in the event of an emergency, and regularly train employees on emergency response procedures. Additionally, the organization may invest in backup systems and redundancies to minimize the likelihood and impact of a disaster.
As the more pressing events of the pandemic subside and things normalize, businesses can focus on making a full recovery from the disaster that occurred. This may involve readjusting a remote work policy or redesigning elements of the office to make people comfortable to return to work.
The Disaster Preparedness Planning branch of business continuity would also focus on proactive measures to mitigate the impact of a potential future crisis. For example, your business may also invest in emergency stockpiles of medical supplies, develop contingency plans for remote work, and establish communication protocols for quickly disseminating critical information.
Business continuity is not a “set it and forget it” protocol. You should revisit the business continuity planning process regularly and update roles and responsibilities as necessary. As new threats emerge, from climate change to cyber-attacks, you may find your planning quickly becomes outdated.
Immediately after you’ve recovered from a disaster is a good time to reflect on any gaps that arose in your business continuity plan. Working with experts, like the team at Thoropass, can help you build the foundations for a resilient business that stands the test of time.
Common gaps in business continuity plans include:
We get it: Everybody’s busy with their day-to-day and business continuity planning can seem a little like saving for a rainy day or making a will. Nice to have? Definitely. The most pressing thing to do today? Not necessarily.
Hesitancy to undertake this work can also stem from a lack of understanding of potential threats. It may feel overwhelming to imagine all the possible things that can occur. It can seem a little too much like doomsday prophesizing.
But in these volatile times, when disaster strikes in many forms, and anything from a simple human error to a major disaster can threaten your business, a business continuity strategy should be considered an operational must-have.
Where possible, there should be documentation outlining the steps to be taken. This is not a time to rely on memory (even the coolest heads can go blank in a disaster). Think of this like the “in case of emergency” cheat sheet located in the pocket of your airplane seat.
Documentation can cover physical actions like evacuating the premises, contact information emergency services, and activating the emergency response team should be well documented and communicated across the organization. At the individual employee level, this might ensure in case of emergency contacts are updated in your HR systems
Who is responsible for calling whom? Who on your team drafts and who approves messages to be put on the company website or social media?
And then there’s the order in which information is cascaded: Should your entire organization and shareholders receive the news before clients? Should the media be made aware before it’s shared with the general public? Again, it may not be possible to outline all the potential scenarios and their idiosyncratic communications protocols, but having a point person to guide actions is clear.
Sometimes, in a panic, employees jump to action. They want to help fix things. But as the saying goes, “if the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, chaos can ensue.” You can wind up with confusion, mixed messages, and more messes to be cleaned up. Even if you run a scrappy business where everybody chips in, this is a time for clear, consistent top-down messaging disseminated appropriately across channels.
The communication protocols outline how information will be disseminated, who will be responsible for communicating, and what channels will be used during the event of a shutdown.
Companies may not have effective backup systems or recovery capabilities in place, leaving them vulnerable to data loss, extended downtime, and other consequences of a disruption. This especially applies in the case of cyber-attacks when critical information can be lost or customer data can be compromised.
Your business should have pre-planned locations or facilities where critical business operations can be shifted as a result of disruption. This may be as simple as a remote work policy for employees. But it can also expand to include backup data centers, coworking facilities, or cloud-based infrastructure.
The recovery time objective is the amount of time or “real” time a critical service can go down before the business begins to experience the adverse effects associated with the disruption. Knowing this gives you a “clock” to work against. If, for example, you run an e-Commerce business, you might have delivery standards you must adhere to (e.g., “all orders ship in 24 hours”), and failing to make those timelines could result in canceled orders and a loss of revenue.
Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) planning requires ongoing investment and commitment from your senior leadership team. Without support and funding from the top, organizations may struggle to prioritize planning and execution efforts.
While this work is often delegated to a combination of IT, Comms, and HR leaders, it is important that there is coordination between teams and that the plans are unified. Remember how confusing it can be when disaster strikes. Having clear plans, roles, and responsibilities will not only eliminate stress but also help people feel a sense of purpose and stability in the midst of crisis.
Again, don’t set it and forget it! Regular testing is crucial for an effective business continuity plan. Simply identifying potential system failures and assessing their impact won’t suffice unless you put your framework to the test. Think of this like running annual fire drills.
Simulating a crisis enables you to identify mission-critical systems, recovery time, and key decision-makers, as well as lapses in judgment and communication. Testing various failure scenarios (whether digital or physical) is vital to understanding your plan’s strengths and weaknesses and determining how to bolster it.
Testing must also adapt to new threats; keeping abreast of industry-specific cyberattack trends can help you create an ironclad strategy for protecting your mission-critical systems. Reviewing and testing service-level agreements regularly is also necessary to build resilient systems.
Business continuity can go very deep. If you’re just getting started, identify the most pressing vulnerabilities and move with purpose through the exercise. This is less a one-off exercise and more a healthy habit, so you’ll continue to improve all three branches as you go!
Business continuity and disaster recovery plans (BCDR) are organization-wide plans to help prepare your business for a wide range of potential crises and to mitigate the impact of such events.
Threats to your business can take various forms—from global pandemics that disrupt supply chains to natural disasters that threaten your physical workspace. However, as businesses rely increasingly on various systems to manage core operations and house crucial information, including customer, employee, and financial data, threats to IT systems loom largest for many business owners.
That’s where your IT business continuity planning comes in. This may be part of a larger business continuity plan or may be conducted in isolation if IT is the sole concern of your business continuity management.
When an event disrupts your business’s operations, a business continuity and disaster recovery plan (BCDR) comes into action. Downtime can lead to financial losses for companies, so minimizing its impact is crucial to ensure prompt business recovery and minimize revenue loss.
Although disaster recovery is a critical function of IT systems, BCDR is much broader than merely ensuring the stability and security of your tech stack. It encompasses various aspects, such as ensuring employee safety, managing brand reputation, crisis management, identifying alternative work locations, and ensuring systems security and data protection.
Therefore, developing a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plan requires thoroughness. While it may not be possible to predict every potential disaster that could befall your business, you can develop fallback plans to utilize when disasters inevitably occur.
When you think of your IT systems, it’s natural to think of things like cyberattacks or systems downtime as posing potential threats to your business continuity. However, IT systems can face various threats that can cause significant damage and disrupt business operations. These threats include:
It’s important for your organization to identify the specific threats that are most relevant to their business and to develop appropriate plans and strategies to mitigate those risks.
Most good plans start with information-gathering, and your IT business continuity plans are no different. The components of gathering the right information are outlined here:
Business continuity management (BCM) is the process of identifying potential threats and risks to an organization, developing plans to mitigate those risks, and ensuring that the organization is prepared to respond effectively to a crisis or disruption.
The goal of BCM is to enable an organization to continue its critical operations during and after a catastrophic event, whether that event is a natural disaster, cyber-attack, or any other unexpected occurrence that could impact the organization’s ability to function.
A business impact analysis (BIA) is a key component of your business continuity management or BCM process. The BIA identifies and evaluates the potential impact of a disruption on critical IT functions and business processes.
When doing a BIA, you’ll:
By conducting a BIA, you can develop targeted and effective recovery strategies that minimize the impact of a disruption on your IT systems. It’s recommended that organizations conduct a BIA at least once a year or whenever there are significant changes to the organization’s operations or risk profile.
As business continuity and disaster recovery are interdependent, there is a significant overlap in devising an IT disaster recovery (DR) plan and an IT business continuity (BC) plan. As such, we like to consider all three branches of BCDR when developing an effective business continuity plan. Those three branches are:
For each IT function, you should have a plan in place that covers all three branches. Let’s look at an example:
Power outages or blackouts can happen for a number of reasons, but if your business is located in a region that is prone to volatile weather or extreme heat, power outages are something you should prepare for well in advance. If and when a power outage occurs, you might have the following steps in place:
With the correct procedures and training in place, your team will know exactly how to respond the next time there’s a blackout. This might include:
Roles and responsibilities will also be clear so people do not duplicate efforts or create confusion.
Now that initial steps and actions have been taken, you can move to actively manage your business while the power is out. Actions taken now will depend on the duration of the power outage, but some options include:
Hooray! The power is restored. Your office can now return to normal productivity. But before everybody jumps in, your tech team might want to:
Having survived an outage, your business might now reassess your preparedness for such events and decide to implement some changes. This can include things like:
Going through each and every IT system, from hardware to software, that your company uses may seem like a daunting task. That responsibility typically falls on the organization’s IT department or a designated IT team.
However, depending on the organization’s size and structure, the responsibility for a successful business continuity plan may also fall on other departments or individuals, such as risk management, operations, human resources, or a business continuity team.
Moreover, your IT team will likely depend on all staff and even business partners for inputs on the nature of certain systems, how essential they are to maintaining business operations, and the revenue implications of those systems being down.
For example, your marketing team may use various systems for email deployment, social media monitoring, content production, and more. As such, your IT team may require information from them on which systems you use that are most critical to maintaining productivity and which systems are most closely tied to revenue.
Because human error puts your IT systems at risk, all staff should also be required to undergo annual training on data security and emergency procedures. Depending on the compliance frameworks your company adheres to, certification may also be required for all employees.
For example, if your company processes credit card information, it may be required for all employees to complete PCI compliance training. PCI compliance training refers to a program or series of courses designed to educate individuals and organizations on the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) and the requirements for complying with these standards.
PCI DSS is a set of security standards developed by major credit card companies to help ensure that businesses that accept, process, store, or transmit credit card information do so in a secure manner and protect against fraud and data breaches.
Just like running regular fire drills, your IT business continuity plan needs to be constantly tested and updated. Plus, every time you do a new business impact analysis (or BIA), you’ll potentially identify new areas of vulnerability that your BCDR needs to account for.
Here are some steps to follow when testing your BCDR plan:
Need help? Working with the experts at Thoropass can help you build the foundations for a resilient business that stands the test of time.
A business continuity and disaster recovery plan will strike many business owners as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a must-have. Or you might think it’s essential for certain business functions (like IT) but less important in others (like PR, Comms, or HR teams.)
We’re here to break the news that you absolutely do need a business continuity and disaster recovery plan for your business. Not having one leaves your business vulnerable to threats — from cyber-attacks to natural disasters. It puts your revenue at risk. And, worst of all, it puts your people at risk too.
Having a good business continuity plan sets you up for enduring success. Because we all know: stuff happens. And no matter how good you think you are in a crisis, having a clear plan that outlines proactive strategies will mean you can jump straight into rapid recovery when disaster occurs rather than waste time procrastinating.
You may feel that business continuity and disaster recovery is something that businesses of a certain scale need, but that doesn’t apply to your business. Or maybe you’re just resigned to “being in hot water” if bad things happen. It’s really common for business owners to think this way. But it’s a misconception:
Every business is different, and threats can depend on the industry, location, and other factors. But these are some of the top threats to most businesses:
Natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and tornadoes can cause significant damage to physical infrastructure and disrupt business operations.
Cyberattacks and data breaches can result in data loss, system downtime, and reputational damage. They can also result in financial losses, regulatory fines, and legal liability.
Mistakes or errors made by employees, contractors, or vendors can result in system failures, data breaches, or other disruptions to business operations.
Disruptions in the supply chain, such as material shortages, production delays, or transportation disruptions, can impact a company’s ability to deliver products or services to customers.
Power outages can occur due to natural disasters, equipment failures, or cyberattacks, and can result in system downtime and data loss.
Pandemics and other public health emergencies can disrupt business operations by requiring employees to work remotely, disrupting supply chains, and impacting customer demand.
It’s important for organizations to identify the specific threats that are most relevant to their business and to develop appropriate plans and strategies to mitigate those risks.
A business continuity and disaster recovery plan (BCDR) is a plan that comes into effect when any event interrupts your business’s uptime. When companies have downtime, they lose money. So minimizing the impact of downtime helps ensure your business gets back on its feet quickly and minimizes lost revenue.
Many organizations have some form of BCDR on the IT side, as disaster recovery is a key function of IT systems. However, BCDR is much broader than ensuring your tech stack is stable and secure. It incorporates the following:
As such, a business continuity and disaster recovery plan is a deep plan that requires thoroughness. While it may not be possible to anticipate every possible disaster that may befall your business, it is possible to develop plans to fall back on when disasters do inevitably occur.
Now that you’re (hopefully) realizing the importance of business continuity planning, you’ll be keen to understand where to start. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed. It can be hard to know where to start developing a plan that’s broad enough to apply to a wide range of situations, from natural disasters to PR crises, but that’s specific enough to be helpful and actionable when crisis occurs.
Thankfully, the field of business continuity and disaster planning is pretty established and there are some tried-and-trusted methodologies for kicking off business continuity planning. Naturally, the first thing you want to do is assess. If you don’t know your vulnerabilities and critical areas, it’s hard to prioritize the actions you need to take should disaster arise. Taking stock of your business with a cool head will help you hone in on the most important aspects of a business plan.
Ready to get going? Here’s where to start:
Part of your business continuity management process may be to conduct a Business Impact Assessment (BIA.) A BIA is used to identify and evaluate the potential impacts of disruption on critical business functions and processes.
The goal of a BIA is to identify the most important business functions and processes that you need to restore quickly after a disruption. It will also help you quantify the potential impacts of a disruption on these functions, so you will know exactly what any delay will cost your business.
During a BIA, an organization will typically identify the critical business functions and processes that are essential to its operations. If you have a larger organization you may engage your business leaders to take inventory of the personnel, technology, tools, and facilities it needs to run and to gauge the impact of downtime on each.
For example, if you run a manufacturing business, the impact of your assembly line being down for an hour can be significant – resulting in unfulfilled orders, unhappy clients, and lost revenue. In contrast, the impact of your social media scheduling tool being down may be merely annoying, but may also impact your ability to provide customer support. However, with the social example, there might be alternative channels that can serve as a backup.
For each function or process, your organization will need to identify the resources needed to support it, such as personnel, technology, and facilities. This can help you identify, for example, that only one person knows how to operate a certain system — and if anything were to happen to that person the impact to your business could be significant.
You’ll then assess and quantify the potential impacts of a disruption to these resources, such as:
The BIA is a crucial component of your business continuity plans, as it helps your organization prioritize your disaster recovery strategies and efforts and allocate resources accordingly.
By identifying the critical functions and processes that must be restored quickly following a disruption, your organization can develop recovery strategies that are targeted and effective, and minimize the impact of the disruption on its operations.
The frequency at which you should conduct a Business Impact Assessment (BIA) will depend on several factors, including your business industry, size, complexity, and risk profile. However, as a general rule, organizations should conduct a BIA at least once a year or whenever there are significant changes to the organization’s operations or risk profile.
Armed with all of this information, you’re ready to start your BCDR plan in earnest. We usually consider that there are three branches to a BCDR plan – you can read about them in more detail here, but we’ll cover the three branches below too.
Your emergency response focuses on the immediate response to a crisis or emergency situation. Think of this as your “to-do plan” if there’s a natural disaster, cyber-attack, or any other unexpected event that can disrupt business operations. In the fire drill example, this would be as simple as “sound the alarm and evacuate the office building using emergency exits.”
The main objective of an emergency or disaster response plan is to ensure the safety of employees and minimize damage to your business property, information, and infrastructure.
Once you’ve got past the initial response to the emergency, you can begin to manage the situation and ensure your business operations can resume. You’re not out of crisis mode yet, but you’ve stabilized things enough that you can move from reactiveness to active management.
Crisis management deals with the restoration of critical business functions after an interruption, including the recovery of data, systems, and operations. The objective is to ensure that business operations can be resumed as quickly as possible and minimize the impact of the disruption. For example, you might have a list of business partners you need to immediately call to inform and reschedule meetings or deliveries.
With the crisis now under control, you can start to rebuild and resume normal operations—this is your disaster recovery strategy. Whether you’re rebuilding infrastructure, recruiting new team members, or regaining customers’ trust, this stage is about getting your business back to where it was.
But you shouldn’t forget the experience and lessons you learned. Disaster recovery plans also focus on the proactive measures that organizations can take to mitigate the impact of another potential disaster or crisis.
Phew! You now have a BCDR plan. You can file it away and rest easy now, right? Sorry, wrong! Just like running regular fire drills, your BCDR plan needs to be constantly tested and iterated. Moreover, every time you do a new business impact analysis (or BIA), you’ll potentially identify new areas of vulnerability that your BCDR needs to account for.
Overall, testing a BCDR plan should be thought of as one of your critical business processes. It helps to ensure that your organization is prepared to respond effectively to a disaster or disruption. By following a structured testing process, your organization can identify and address weaknesses in the plan, and increase its overall level of preparedness.
Ready to get started and/or need help? Working with the experts at Thoropass can help you build the foundations for a resilient business that stands the test of time, including building and maintaining a rock-solid business continuity and disaster recovery plan.
Any organization, no matter how big or how small, is bound to undergo some kind of disruption at some point. With everything needed to keep a business up and running, it’s almost impossible for something not to go wrong. That’s why analyzing and measuring operational and financial impacts on the business is important.
In this article, we’ll cover the basics of what a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is and the steps you need to conduct one.
A business impact analysis predicts the consequences of a disruption in critical business processes or elements. It involves processing and gathering the human and technology resources needed to come up with an appropriate recovery strategy.
A major disruption can lead to any of the following:
Any one of these issues can completely derail your organization, no matter the market conditions. As a result, it is important to pinpoint the exact locations of vulnerabilities in critical business functions and close the gaps through rigorous business impact analysis followed by thorough business continuity plan implementations.
Before we dive into conducting a BIA, it is worth noting that many of the steps outlined here should be customized according to your organization’s business needs. This will ensure you obtain the highest ROI (return on investment).
During a disaster, time is of the essence, and prioritizing the most critical business elements will go a long way during the recovery phase. In order to successfully carry this out, however, it is important to identify the criticality of all the elements across all verticals within the organization.
Business functions like sales, production, legal, supply chain management, finance, customer service, and PR are essential elements that make up the inner workings of the organization. When any of these areas is significantly impacted by disruption, it can spell disaster for the entire company.
Roping in key decision makers for input through a business impact analysis questionnaire can uncover detailed knowledge about specific vulnerabilities should certain critical elements fail. More specifically, this information should uncover each function’s contribution to revenue generation, the impact on customer service, the role it plays in regulatory compliance requirements, and other business-specific variables.
Establishing criteria of criticality can help organize how essential the function is towards operations and what the impact is in the case of a disruption.
Understanding your key risks and impacts prior to making any process changes will help you better understand the scope of changes as well as the exact steps to take when making them.
There are an infinite number of risks and impacts that can befall any organization, but the key here is to figure out the ones that are most likely to have an impact on your processes in the current environment that you are in.
You can look at the laundry list of natural disasters, technology failures, human errors, regulatory changes, and internal or external threats. Still, it won’t do you any good unless you can whittle down the most likely risks you face. You need to first define the purpose and scope of your risk assessment efforts.
Figuring out what you want to achieve for a specific critical business element will help you narrow down the action items to take to patch up any existing vulnerabilities.
For example, if you are a business associate or covered entity in the healthcare industry, you run a high probability of getting fined by a regulatory body like the ONC or CMS if you are not up to date with the HIPAA Privacy Rule in your current business practices. Expert judgment and data analysis can help you prioritize and identify which practices are likely to have a major impact on your business in the case of a disruption.
Assess the severity of the potential impacts of each identified risk or disruption on the critical elements. Consider factors such as the duration of the disruption, the magnitude of the impact, and the recovery time objectives (RTOs) for each function.
Knowing the severity of disruption ahead of time can help you implement a continuity plan closer to the ideal scenario of a disruption having no impact at all. Take into consideration factors like disruption duration and impact magnitude:
The internal and external systems and resources that are fundamental to your business operations can also be a source of risk. Locating these vendors, suppliers, IT systems, and other stakeholders critical to your success and assessing them for risk might change how and with whom you form those partnerships.
Depending on an external party for a certain service might place more stress on your processes than bringing everything in-house. On the other hand, the opposite could hold true. Therefore, it is important to thoroughly assess your partnerships and create a situation where you carry the least amount of risk.
Develop recovery strategies and options for each critical business function based on the identified risks, impacts, and dependencies. This may include strategies such as backup and redundancy plans, alternative sourcing, remote working arrangements, or other contingency measures.
When we talk about recovery strategies, we are really talking about ways to mitigate the current situation with the goal of getting as close to a disruption never happening in the first place or, at the very least, ensuring that critical business operations are up and running as quickly as possible.
Depending on the circumstance, recovery might look like using backup product suppliers to find an appropriate remote working environment for critical team members. Regardless of what it looks like, contingency measures need to be carefully pre-defined so they can be deployed without hesitation at a moment’s notice.
Based on the analysis that you have conducted, the next step is to begin to implement your findings into some mitigation measures. This will make up the bulk of the business continuity plan. You can segment this across different areas of the business, including:
Having an IT infrastructure that has built-in redundancy controls allows users to continue obtaining information, even in the event of a failure. More specifically, fault tolerance will allow visitors to receive access to the requested site, albeit with limited functionality.
This can be done by implementing redundant servers and storage devices to minimize a single point of failure. Load balancing can also be implemented to make sure that operations still continue even if an individual component fails.
Delegating roles and responsibilities, emergency services coordination, and resource allocation are all key components of an effective emergency response plan.
Figuring out how employees should react to evacuation protocols, shutdown procedures, and data recovery protocols is critical to operations in the midst of a disruption. Running exercises and tabletop sessions to prepare ahead of time is critical to the process flowing smoothly.
Communication will be one of the most critical aspects you can optimize in the event of a business disruption. Communication plans should outline:
Following these steps are crucial to surviving a catastrophic event or sudden business disruption. The specifics of each step will be different according to organizational needs and will make up a unique business impact analysis report. If you need any help coming up with your specific business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan, make sure to reach out to an expert.
Contrary to popular belief, resilient organizations don’t just naturally fall into place. They use a combination of tools and analyses that are painstakingly strategized, developed, tested, and implemented.
A successfully executed business impact analysis entails asking the right questions and implementing the right strategy at the right time. It requires knowing the ins and outs of the organization and getting to the bottom of key vulnerabilities in critical elements that your senior management can point out.
Understand that business disruptions are going to be a natural part of business operations in general. Evaluate your current strategies on a regular basis to stay in step with the current environment. Putting together a business impact analysis team that can make this a core part of your overall day-to-day business operations will get you that much closer to total organizational resilience.
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