Business Continuity Management 101
Publié le 4 September 2024
Expecting the unexpected becomes much easier with a deep dive into business continuity management 101.
Business continuity is the ability of a business or an organization to overcome an incident or a disaster. It doesn’t matter if this is man-made or a natural disaster – when it strikes, your business needs to be ready. The way for it to be ready? With proper business continuity management, of course.
Thinking that your business is not susceptible to most incidents – because it is too small, for instance – is a major error. Many businesses think they are immune to cybersecurity threats, for instance, so basically 51% of small and medium businesses don’t have any security measures in place!
Any business, regardless of its niche or status, is susceptible to all kinds of disasters. This includes not only natural disasters or power outages, but also breaches, cyberattacks, and more.
According to FEMA, about 25% of businesses never reopen after disasters. For your business to survive in an already competitive market when a disaster strikes, you need proper business continuity planning. In this post, we’ll teach you all about business continuity management.
What is business continuity management?
Business continuity refers to how your organization ensures the continuity of its work at a time of crisis. This also refers to how you lead through a crisis and deal with it with minimal impact on the organization’s processes, resources, operations, and the people employed in it.
It is pretty straightforward. The most important thing for any business is its survival. Only then can we think about its growth or progress.
So, what is business continuity management, then?
This refers to all the activities, plans, and processes your organization has in place to ensure business continuity.
Steps to proper business continuity management
Let’s say that you want to have a plan, a strategy in place in case a crisis happens. What steps should you take?
The answers all lie in business continuity management or, as we will refer to it here, BCM. Generally speaking, this involves the following aspects:
- Comprehensive risk assessment
- Selection of appropriate technologies
- Detection and prioritization of critical assets
- Initial responses in case of crisis
- Recovery strategies and procedures
- Maintaining a favorable public image
- Business continuity testing
Now that you have this list, how efficient do you believe your organization is? If you are ready to create a proper BCM plan, we will now delve into all of these steps separately.
1. Comprehensive risk assessment
Before you can fight any risks or overcome a crisis, you need to know what you are dealing with. Business continuity management starts with a comprehensive risk assessment. Before you create a business continuity management plan, you need to think of the different scenarios that would be considered a crisis for your business.
Understanding an organization’s vulnerabilities is the first and key step toward building a more resilient business.
2. Selection of appropriate technologies
In many cases, a crisis can be prevented instead of dealt with after it occurs. This is why any good BCM plan will include a list of useful technologies that prevent a crisis or help the organization deal with it when it occurs.
Let’s consider some examples of this.
AML screening technology
Let’s make something clear. If you are using customer data for order processing, personalization, and more, it is your responsibility to keep it safe. This is why tools for AML compliance are vital. In case of data breaches and laundering, your business is not only at risk of legal problems but also of reputational damage that is often impossible to fix. AML screening is the process of automatically carrying out the required checks and ensuring that your business avoids customers who plan to carry out money laundering operations.
Cloud services and backup systems
Another highly useful technology that every organization should implement regardless of its niche, is cloud services and backup systems. Cloud services and backup systems will keep your data available in case it is lost or somehow damaged.
3. Detection and prioritization of critical assets
Do you know which assets and processes are the key to your business continuity and survival? What are the processes and assets you couldn’t function without if a crisis occurs? This can include everything from critical data to essential systems to key personnel.
Not only should you be aware of these assets, but these should be the core of your business continuity management efforts.
4. Initial responses in case of crisis
Some crises are unavoidable. For instance, you might be managing remote workers and a large number of them quit to work elsewhere in a single month. You now have an employee deficit and can’t complete the organization’s orders on time – or handle its operations efficiently. Or, a disaster strikes, and your company’s digital files are all gone.
This is why the first step was to prepare for different scenarios. Right where you created that list of possible scenarios, there is one important response to add – what you will first tackle in case of a crisis. Just keep in mind that your initial response should always be to ensure the safety of life and property, with everything else going after it.
5. Recovery strategies and procedures
The average survival rate for companies that don’t have a disaster recovery plan is less than 10%. You will surely agree – the odds aren’t in these companies’ favor. This is why you need recovery strategies and procedures included in your business continuity plan.
The initial response is exactly what the name says – the action you take first. However, most crises demand an entire process to recuperate the losses, ensure business continuance, and keep the organization functional.
What you need now is an entire recovery strategy.
Now, in reality, you cannot prepare for every crisis that might happen. You also cannot anticipate the business’ reaction to a crisis and what exactly it will affect. What you can do is plan some recovery procedures that will help you in different scenarios, including:
- Create a response team. Before any crisis occurs, have a response team in place to tackle it immediately. Pick employees who will be the leaders and main participants in the recovery process. This is the point where you do some employee training and communicate with your team as a leader. Make sure everyone knows what is expected of them in case of a crisis to get the systems back up as quickly as possible.
- Back up the data for recovery. We’ve already mentioned that businesses can leverage technology like the cloud to do backups of all of their data – and this is the point where that is absolutely necessary. If you want to have a recovery plan in place, you need backup. Consider virtual appliances, cloud backup, and on-premises backup.
- Employee training. When you have a written business continuity plan in hand, it’s not just for you – it is for your team as well. We aren’t only talking about the key management in the company that will lead the team. Every employee should be aware of their roles and responsibilities, and have access to a plan in the event of a disaster.
- Communication protocols. The key to fixing an ongoing crisis is effective communication in most cases. This is why, before a crisis occurs, outline the main communication protocols and channels your team will use, including internal communication among the team members and external communication with clients and stakeholders.
6. Maintaining a favorable public image
When a crisis happens, chances are you will be able to handle it internally. But, if a major crisis occurs, this can impact everything from the service you provide to its quality. Undoubtedly, a bigger crisis will get out there, and if you don’t handle it right, it can cause irreparable damage to your organization’s public image.
Proper business continuity management requires that you handle the internal problems as fast as you can, but that is only half of the solution. You must also focus on the public image and the company’s reputation. With that in mind, that recovery plan of yours should include strategies that will help you regain the trust of your employees, such as transparency, continuous updates, and maybe even some freebies and discounts – just to mention a few.
7. Business continuity testing
BCP isn’t a one-time process and something you can complete today and forget about tomorrow. For it to be efficient, you need to test it before the crisis happens. If you do this now, you can find the flaws in your plan and fix them. If you see them when the crisis actually happens, it can cause more problems than solutions.
Does your organization have good business continuity management?
Based on what you read here, would you say that your organization BCM is good enough? Do you think that, if faced with a crisis, your plan will allow you to handle it fast and with minimal consequences?
If the answer is yes, congratulations – you have done your best to ensure the company’s survival and progress. If not, the time to work on it starts right now, and you can use this look at business continuity management 101 to guide you.
