Business continuity management is the process of identifying risks to your organisation and exploring solutions. Proper business continuity planning involves creating a set of priorities and first steps in response to any incident. It also requires understanding what’s feasible and achievable after an event. This means business continuity management must be mindful of budgets, resources, and workforce that will be available after a crisis and prioritise how to use those resources most effectively.
We’re sharing some best practice tips guidelines for creating and implementing business continuity management.
Discover and Review All Potential Threats
The foundation of all business continuity planning is identifying potential threats and analysis. Your organisation could be affected in several ways, from data breaches to natural disasters. Excellent business continuity management begins by scoping all the possible ways your business could be disrupted.
Everything should be considered during the phase of planning, and all potential threats should be included, no matter how unlikely it is to occur. Naturally, it’s impossible to guess all the potential risks your business may face. Still, addressing business continuity planning from as many aspects as possible means you’ll likely have a strategy that can adapt to fit almost any curveball you’re thrown. Be sure to analyse and review each of these threats for their likelihood and severity.
Conduct a Thorough Business Impact Analysis
After detailing the potential threats your organisation might face, the next step is to conduct a business impact analysis to see how your daily operations could be affected.
Key questions to consider might be:
- How might my supply chain be affected?
- Will this limit our access to crucial information?
- Could this put our clients’ information at risk?
- How long after an incident, would it take to establish minimum operational ability?
- How long would it take our business to recover back to normal operations after a crisis?
Be thorough with your responses as a vital element of a business impact analysis is reviewing the feasibility of your response. You’ll need to determine if you have the resources to respond and how long it would take you to gather those resources in a crisis.
Create Flexibility in Your Supply Chain and Data Structure
For organisations that manufacture or distribute physical goods, creating flexibility means ensuring that your supply chain is responsive to global conditions. An earthquake in Japan or a Typhoon in Hong Kong could wreak havoc with your entire supply channel. The key is to identify such weak points and create agile supply chains that could substitute for a facility that’s shut down as a redundant measure.
For companies in client services, the same principle applies to all your data. Ensure there are offsite backups of all your information, and you have a robust IT management system in place so that an attack on one part of your network doesn’t cripple your whole organisation and allows workers to continue working without disruption.
Business Continuity Management, Applied
As you plan for disruptions and natural disasters, with a well thought out strategy, you’ll be better prepared to respond to incidents when they arise. With clear priorities about what parts of your organisation to restore first, you’ll be backed up and running quickly with minimal hassle avoiding disruption.
Both employers and the employees must be committed to the prospects and demands of working remotely, especially during this period of social isolation. We hope the insights discussed in this article are excellent ways to start.
