Business Continuity Management (BCM) is the process of identifying the potential impacts to a business and to provide a resilient framework in response. An effective response safeguards the interests of the key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value creating activities. Impacts could be small scale disruptions, such a system outage or large scale disruptions such as the loss of an entire office due to fire or catastrophe. The aim is to minimise the impact and likelihood of disruptions.
The key elements within BCM are the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), Risk Assessments, Resumption Activities and Tactics. Documentation is required to support the process, which includes: Business Continuity Management Policy, Business Continuity Plans (BCP) and Incident Management Plans.
Optial’s Solution
The Optial system is flexible and comprehensively supports the best practice framework for BCM (as defined by the Business Continuity Institute’s Good Practice Guidelines). Optial’s Business Continuity Module contains the following elements:
- Business Continuity Policy
- Business Continuity Plans / library
- Incident Management Plans / library
- Activity Resumption Plans
- Business Impact Analysis library
- BIA Products/Services
- BIA Activities
- BIA Tactics
- Quantitative results captured - Maximum Tolerable Outage (MTO), Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)
- Risk assessments, resumption plans and tactics can be set up and managed for each business area, product, service or process
- Distribution and review of the Corporate BCM Policy, Business Continuity Plans and Incident Management Plans and can be explicitly linked to BIAs.
All of the above activities undergo individual workflow processes based on their assignment to an owner and their paths are tracked through the approval process.
Optial provides the business continuity manager with a robust and auditable framework to:
- Record the business activities and management owners across the organisation
- Identify and track impacts which may result in damage to the organisation’s reputation, assets or financial position
- Quantify the timescale within which the interruption of each business activity becomes unacceptable to the organisation
- Assign risk assessments, resumption plans and specific tactics to resume the activities
- The system provides a workflow based approval process for each component
- Facility to link BIAs, Risk Assessments, products/services, activities, tactics, policies and plans to provide full transparency
- Produce management reports at a business level and aggregated at group level.
Overall, Optial provides a single facility for managing business continuity activities - storing and managing critical BCM data, such as outage times, recovery times, risk assessments, policies and plans. Results can be analysed and reported on using Optial’s powerful OBI reporting tool so that management are fully aware of the organisation’s ability to recover from business critical impacts.
If you would like further information on Optial Products or services email: request@optial.com or telephone: +44 (0) 207 247 7673.