Everything You Need to Know About Business Continuity Management (BCM)

BCM is a very important process for any business. It will ensure that you can maintain business operations during any disaster. BCM is becoming more important with time. Natural disasters can disrupt your business operations. Thus, it can damage the reputation of your business. BCM will help you in mitigating these events.

What is BCM?

BCM is the advanced preparation and planning of an enterprise for dealing with disasters. Its main aim is to continue business operations without any disruption. Business leaders should work on identifying the problems that can happen in the future. Thus, BCM also involves defining all the potential risks. Some of these risks are cyber attacks, earthquake or floods. After that, it is important to make sure that these procedures work. Thus, it is important to do proper testing of these procedures.

BCM Framework

1. Strategies and policies

Most companies think that BCM is only about the reaction to any disaster. However, it begins with strategies and policies. The aim of these policies is to reduce the downtime of your applications. It is also important to test these policies before any actual incident occurs.

Your policy will contain all the important details like key parties and policy scope. It should also contain the details of your management structure. First, you have to find the person responsible for creating your BCM plans. After that, you should find a team for implementing your plan. This plan will provide you clarity during a disaster.

The scope of the plan is also important. It will define what continuity means for your organization. For example, some companies want their products available during the disaster. However, some companies want their people to be safe first. First, you must have a clear scope in your mind.

You also need to assign roles in this phase. Some of these rules can be specific. Also, communication plays an important role. Make sure that everyone knows about their roles and responsibility.

2. Impact Assessment

In this step, you need to figure out the data that you are storing. Also, you need to figure out how to access this data. This will help you in finding the data which is important for your company. Also, you need to determine the amount of downtime that is acceptable.

Every company is aiming for 100% uptime. However, 100% uptime is not possible. You also need to determine your recovery time objective in this phase. This is the maximum time that you can take for restoring your applications.

Also, you must know about your recovery point objective. This is the age of your data that is acceptable for your company. It is also known as the data loss acceptability factor.

3. Risk Assessment

It is important to perform a risk assessment. This will help you in determining all the potential risks.

Some of the common threats are market conditions, natural disasters, and political matters. This is also the main component of your BCM plan. You should identify all the potential risks in this phase.

The risk assessment will help you in identifying all the potential threats. If you are working in a heavily regulated industry, then you should consider the risk of non-compliance also. Government agencies can fine you for breaking regulations. Also, you can lose your credibility. Thus, it is important to make sure that you are following regulations.

After that, you should determine the probability of these risks. Also, you should measure the impact of these risks. Potential and Probability are the two most important measures in risk assessment.

You also need to determine the risk tolerance for every threat. It is important to determine the critical issues. In this phase, you also need to identify potential solutions. After that, you should rank your risks. However, this phase is not static. You should regularly upgrade your list according to new threats.

4. Testing

You need to continuously monitor potential risks. Also, it is important to regularly measure their impacts. You should also test your mitigation plans. This will ensure that your plan is working correctly.

5. Identify Incident

It is also important to define every incident. You should describe every potential event in your policy. Also, you should define what can trigger these incidents.

6. Disaster Recovery

Most people think that BCM and DR are the same. However, there are some key differences between them. BCM is the plan that will establish policy. But, Disaster recovery defines what will happen during the incident. It involves the deployment of your teams for dealing with the incident.

You need to identify the risks in Disaster Recovery. After that, you need to remediate them. Thus, it focuses on a specific incident response only. However, BCM involves planning for all the possible events.

After any disaster, you should assess your response. This will help you in revising your plans.

7. Importance of Communication

Communication plays a very important role in managing continuity. You should ensure that your teams are communicating with each other. Your stakeholders must know about your BCM plan. Communication strategies are very important during any disaster. You must be always in touch with your main team. Communication must be accurate and consistent. You should also use tools that will indicate critical needs and progress.

Conclusion

BCM plans are becoming more important with time. If you don’t have a BCM plan, then your business is not ready for potential incidents. This can lead to various problems. Your applications can face downtime. Downtime will result in loss of revenue. Also, you can lose your brand reputation. If you are facing downtime frequently, then your customers will move to other platforms. This can affect your customer retention rate. If you are working in the healthcare sector, then downtime can cause huge damage to your business. Thus, it is very important to have a BCM plan. It will help you in protecting your data integrity. You can use the above frameworks for building your own strategy. If you need more information regarding BCM, then you can contact Bleuwire.

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