CSO

No amount of planning or redundancy can prevent process failure. When a BCE occurs, an effective response helps ensure minimal impact on customers, employees, and investors. It also provides input into a process which incrementally improves both prevention and response.

We continue with our look at Business Continuity Event Management (BCEM) planning by looking at developing and managing the two key BCEM documents: the incident response plan (IRP) and the business continuity plan (BCP).

BIA is a continuous process, with repeated analysis when new systems are implemented, major upgrades occur, or processes change. The output of the BCEM BIA includes not only useful insight into business continuity event risk and ways to mitigate it. It also includes documented controls and event response processes ensuring rapid detection and effective recovery of failed process components. In this article, we step through how to conduct a BIA as part of business continuity event management.

This is only the first part of the business continuity event management preparation step, but it’s arguably the most important. Without understanding how and why the business functions, critical processes for reaching business objectives, potential threats to process continuity, and internal and external process dependencies, it’s difficult to build and manage a truly effective BCEM plan.

The purpose of Business Continuity Event Management (BCEM) is reduction of harm to employees, customers, investors, and the business when an unexpected business interruption—a business continuity event (BCE)--occurs. In this post, I provide an overview of how to manage a BCE. In future posts, we’ll incrementally expand this high-level view into a BCEM plan.

Ensuring business recovery from a business continuity event (BCE) depends heavily on properly estimating and planning for maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) for each critical process. In this post, we examine the relationship between MTDs, business impact analysis, and incident recovery capabilities for non-catastrophic events.

It isn’t good enough just to get a process operational again after an interruption. If it takes too long to restore delivery of critical employee or customer services, getting it back online might no longer matter; you’ll be out of business. Ensuring process interruption doesn’t exceed its defined maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) is a key element of its business continuity plan (BCP).

Business Continuity Management is a proactive approach to ensuring established processes are designed and implemented to consistently achieve business objectives, even when the unexpected happens--and it begins with your leadership.