CONTINUITY, RESILIENCE AND RECOVERY

Overview

Continuity, Resilience, and Recovery plays a significant role in organizations ensuring that they have in place the right procedures in place to resume and recover organizations from business disruptions and disasters.

Continuity, Resilience, and Recovery Systems include a set of activities that are based on strategic approaches for designing, managing and improving the processes and procedures that play an important role in delivering quality services and/or products in an organization.

What is Business Continuity?

The ISO 22300 standard defines business continuity as: “The capability of an organization to continue the delivery of products or services at acceptable predefined levels following a disruption”.

A disruption could be anything from your superstar employee moving to your competitor, new legislation forcing you to make drastic changes to your products, or an unforeseen event in the local or global economy that destroys what you have taken years to build. Business continuity means anticipating such disruptions and preparing a plan to ensure that you can continue business operations if the disruptions materialize.

What is Business Resiliency?

The ISO 22316 standard defines organizational resilience as: “The ability of an organization to absorb and adapt in a changing environment to enable it to deliver its objectives and to survive and prosper.”

ITIL 4 defines resilience as the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and adapt to both incremental changes and sudden disruptions from an external perspective.

In simple terms, it means taking a blow and recovering from it. For a business, that means that when disruption occurs, you have mechanisms in place to absorb the hit without significant impairment to your business operations.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery assumes the interruption of business operations “as usual” by events such as power outages, natural disasters, or just plain human error. Rather than simply finding a way to mitigate the damage caused by the event, disaster recovery focuses on getting business back to normal. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) helps you transition from alternative business processes back to your regular processes.

What is business impact analysis (BIA)?

A business impact analysis (BIA) is a systematic process to determine and evaluate the potential effects of an interruption to critical business operations as a result of a disaster, accident or emergency. A BIA is an essential component of an organization's business continuity plan (BCP). It includes an exploratory component to reveal any threats and vulnerabilities and a planning component to develop strategies for minimizing risk. The result is a business impact analysis report, which describes the potential risks specific to the organization studied.

What is Emergency Management?

Emergency planning management refers to the coordination and management of resources and responsibilities pertaining to the mitigation of, preparedness for, response to, and recovery from an emergency. This includes the gathering, management, and analysis of big data for the purpose of integrating a data-driven approach into each phase of the emergency management cycle. ‍

What is Crisis Management?

Crisis Management is an organization’s process- and strategy-based approach for identifying and responding to a threat, an unanticipated event, or any negative disruption with the potential to harm people, property, or business processes. Being prepared for any event to become a crisis requires a crisis management plan.

Crises can occur at any moment with or without warning, and can take many forms: natural disasters, active shooter scenarios, terrorist events, mass violence occurrences, and even global pandemics. Beyond any immediate threat to people, property, and processes, crises and critical emergency events often yield unpredictable and cascading effects on employee morale, brand reputation, customer satisfaction, and even the supply chain.

Proper planning for critical events includes establishing a crisis management team and developing a crisis management (CM) plan to keep people from harm, maintain business continuity, enable recovery from disaster, and protect assets before, during, and after a critical event occurs. Further, it is imperative that every organization validates and tests its CM plan and deploys the right emergency communications technology to support crisis response across the organization.