Features

Making Business Continuity A Business Strategy

By Allen Ma, President, Asia/Pacific, BT

"I think Business Continuity Management is becoming more mainstream," Peter Neumann, Aon Reed Stenhouse Inc.'s senior vice president and national risk control director, agrees. "One of the things we are clearly finding when we respond to requests for quotations for business is a line item that says, 'Tell us a bit about your BCM.'"

Business continuity plan has become an integral part of today’s businesses, which are on constant threats from natural disasters and other catastrophes. To successfully maintain business continuity it is imperative to provide employees, partners and employees with continued access to critical resources and data even if the usual office facilities are unavailable. Business continuity encompasses a variety of processes related to preparing for, coping with and recovering from emergencies or disasters. Remote access services software is one way to ensure this.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) has changed significantly over the years, and is continuing to evolve. In addition to changes to the BCM approach and methodology itself, both convergence; the bringing together of voice, data and applications onto a common IP infrastructure and high-availability solutions have also significantly improved the way companies can achieve business continuity.

However, according to BT’s business continuity, security and governance practice, many companies still regard BCM as an insurance policy at best and an unnecessary inconvenience at worst, despite being increasingly called into action thanks to recent headline events.

The main purpose of BCM is to ensure that an organisation has appropriate measures in place to mitigate the impact of any disruption to its mission critical activities. In the digital networked economy, where enterprises rely on close collaborative relationships with suppliers, partners and customers, inadequate provision for business continuity can spell disaster. Companies can certainly face financial problems, loss of trust and tarnished reputation, if their systems are down for a significant period of time, or customers are unable to place orders on web sites for example. Depending on the scale of damage caused, and the length of time it takes to recover, they may even cease operating altogether.

But as well as guarding against these negative outcomes, BCM offers a number of positive benefits in its own right. It is gaining in importance as a way of creating brand differentiation and maintaining competitive advantage. By demonstrating a company’s reliability and its ability to deliver when others may fail, BCM is often pivotal to gaining new business and retaining a loyal customer base.

There is still widespread resistance to adopting procedures and policies for effective business continuity. To overcome this, it is important to see BCM for what it actually is. Rather than being a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ mechanism for corporate recovery, it is, as the name suggests, a way of doing business successfully and in a sustainable way.

Successful and effective BCM requires senior managers to look at their organisation differently. The business needs to be understood, not as a group of assets, but as a number of value-generating activities that take place across both the organisation’s component parts and the ‘extended boundaries’ of the digital networked economy that incorporate suppliers and partners.

To do this, companies should see their business from the outside in. Looking from the top down, they must consider what is important to their stakeholders in the value chain: customers, shareholders, suppliers, partners and regulators. Focusing on a particular system from the bottom up, may cause organisations to overlook the real source of vulnerability to business continuity and fail to mitigate the loss of revenue and market share. With the benefits of convergence and high-availability solutions to address these vulnerabilities, now is the time for companies to reconsider what BCM means to them and how they can best achieve continuity, brand enhancement and agility.

A primary function of BCM is identifying what a firm’s value generating activities are. For any company to succeed it needs to understand the true nature of the organisation itself; ensure that all its stakeholders, who include investors and consumers, are protected; and that risks are managed to acceptable levels. Organisations need to realise that business continuity is about information not IT solutions.

Peter Neumann, Aon Reed Stenhouse Inc.'s senior vice president and national risk control director thinks the full entrenchment of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) will likely take place in the next 10-15 years, becoming as much a part of corporate best practices as financial, environmental and safety audits. "This whole thing about BCP is really a cultural element that has to be ingrained into the minds of the corporation," he concludes. "As we move forward, this is just another management requirement that will be instilled in the way we run companies."


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