Business Continuity Planning

Many organizations are not sufficiently prepared to respond to incidents that threaten their businesses continuity. Losing critical systems, processes or data in a security breach could send an organization into a tailspin.

In today’s economy, a plan that enables a business to quickly recover from downtime or help prevent disaster is not an option – it is a critical success factor for business continuity. Enterprise Risk Management provides IT security consulting and  Business Continuity Planning (BCP) services which assist organizations in developing flexible end-to-end solutions that maintain the availability of their information system infrastructure, critical data and core business processes in case of disaster. Our Business Continuity Planning (BCP) framework addresses the following phases of business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan development:

1. Risk Assessment: ERM can help in the identification and documentation of all potential threats, the probability of their occurrence and also their impact. We can also help in the Enterprise-wide assessment of systems, applications and functions and establish the time period for which the organization can live without it based on their criticality.
2. Business Impact Analysis: ERM can help in the systematic process of gathering and analyzing information about an organization’s essential functional and operational business units and processes. This information is then used to determine what the impacts on the organization would be if these functions and processes were interrupted.
3. Continuity Strategy Selection and Drafting of Emergency Procedures: Upon completion of the RA and BIA, ERM can help select a Continuity Strategy taking into consideration the size and complexity of your organization. Upon selection of an appropriate strategy, emergency procedures will be drafted in the form of a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan for all critical functions and applications. As an added precaution, wherever possible, manual procedures will be incorporated to circumvent the applications and systems.
4. BCP Testing, Training and Awareness: Upon formulation of the BCP, the business continuity plan needs to be tested to ensure effectiveness. ERM can help by providing testing scripts to evaluate each and every part of the business continuity and disaster recovery plan and help rectify any discrepancies that are identified.
   ERM can also help conduct training and awareness programs to ensure that all employees are made familiar with both the business continuity plan and the disaster recovery plan, and can follow the necessary steps in the event of a disaster.

The entire business continuity and disaster recovery planning process is geared towards providing organizations as well as stakeholders comfort that if the worst happens, the organization will recover quickly and cost effectively.