Business Continuity
All businesses should have a proven plan for business resilience. The level of resilience may vary depending on the company, business focus and customer type. However, given a situation that severely affects your business-as-usual state or even stops it completely, ensuring that your business can continue as normal or at least be able to recover to a given point in time and reliable state is critical.
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is something that all organisations should practice, but it is important to understand that BCM must go beyond making your IT systems resilient.
There are three basic points to consider when approaching BCM:
1. Identifying potential threats to your business
2. Assessing the impact of those threats on your business
3. Building the organisational resilience needed to counter and/or deal with these threats
When building your resilience measures you need to develop effective responses to the different threats that were identified.
Upon the recognition of a threat to your business you need to invoke a system that brings together the best personnel in a collaborative environment where they can communicate in real time, share relevant and current information, be able to assign and manage actions and which keeps everyone informed according to their role within the response plan.
CLIO is a software based incident management system that enables you to manage any incident or crisis whatever level it is, from minor day-to-day events right through to major life threatening crises.
It gives you a single collaborative, real-time platform for overall management of your Business Continuity plans, Crisis Management plans and Emergency Response plans.
It will pull together the nominated team for the specific response and help them to manage all activity and stay ahead of any unfolding incident. It also securely records and logs all activity and communications so that you can late review and audit what happened to use for revising your plans or for evidential purposes should you be faced with such a demand.
CLIO allows you to respond in a much more holistic way to evolving or escalating incidents and give you an end-to-end view of any threat or incident as it evolves. The response team can include personnel from Security, Operations, IT, Health & Safety, etc., to deal with the core elements of a threat but can also include personnel from PR and Legal to ensure that any access to or briefing of media, or dealing with legal implications can be undertaken promptly.
Likewise, senior management can also use CLIO to keep abreast of any situation with only the information they need to be aware of and ensure they are in a strong position to intervene if required or be able to respond to questions that they may face.
Using CLIO enables any organisation to perform a much wider level of BCM and help prevent escalation of an incident to something much more serious.
The end result is to reduce the operational impact on your business, minimise any potential loss of revenue and to either keep your business running or to get it back up and running rapidly, efficiently and with minimal risk exposure.