Why is Effective Business Continuity Management Important?

Business continuity management (BCM) denotes how organizations plan for and respond to risks. Mission-critical functions must continue to run after disruptions such as bad weather or hackers.

A business continuity plan documents how your organization will continue to operate after a natural or man-made disaster, severe market conditions or sudden changes in leadership. This could be anything from a stock market crash to a hurricane to the death or dire illness of a key leader. BCPs are hot topics thanks to growing legislation and increased risks related to data security and other events. Every organization would benefit from adopting some kind of BCP framework, however modest.

What is Business Continuity Management?

Business continuity management (BCM) denotes how organizations plan for and respond to risks. Mission-critical functions must continue to run after disruptions such as bad weather or hackers. Smart planning also makes it possible for employees to return to business as usual quickly.

How Does Business Continuity Work?

The most effective way to achieve transparent, seamless risk management and disaster recovery is via a business continuity management system. This may require some outside assistance since any BCMS adopted should follow international standard ISO 22301 requirements. All businesses can begin the first phase themselves, however, by building a continuity plan that identifies and minimizes risks.

What’s the Big Deal With ISO 22301?

ISO 22301 lays out a road map for an effective BCMS and is the most credible resource for successful business continuity management. Becoming ISO 22301-certified signals to clients that your company has a game plan in case disaster strikes — certification helps clients decide that your firm is a solid investment for their business.

This certification proves to prospective clients that your organization will continue to provide the products or services they need, even if an emergency arises. It also gives you an:

• Independent evaluation of your business continuity management, providing assurance or offering areas for improvement
• Accredited certification with regular audits to ensure continual improvement
• Oversight of regulatory requirements to ensure legal compliance. This could include the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or new state and federal privacy regulations impacting customer data collection and storage.

What’s is Disaster Recovery vs. BCM?

People are often confused by the difference between these two terms. They aren’t synonyms. Business continuity deals with relocation and business functions while disaster recovery, which is a subset of business continuity, deals with the technical recovery of systems and resources.

Disaster recovery outlines how to recover technical functions, sites, operations and applications. A business continuity plan may contain many disaster recovery plans.

What Are the Key Components of a BCP?

A successful business continuity plan includes the following:

• Succession plans for key employees
• Identification of critical functions with priority identified
• All employees’ contact information and role in the plan
• Tested backup strategies