Nowadays, disruption is a matter of when not if.
Events once considered Black Swans like the pandemic and great-power war have become more commonplace and longer lasting. Meanwhile, top risks, such as cyber incidents, business interruptions, and natural catastrophes, have become more costly and impactful.
In turn, businesses must strategically prepare to navigate this deteriorating risk environment if they want to stay afloat and continue to grow unimpeded. Key to these resilience-enhancing efforts is business continuity management software.
Software designed to make BCM processes, metrics, and compliance more efficient and accurate, business continuity technology helps organizations proactively anticipate unforeseen events, better respond to interruption, and reduce downtime to minimize the negative impacts incidents may have.
The ways in which business continuity management software prepares your organization for disruption
How else does business continuity software prepare organizations to manage any disruption? Here are the six ways:
1. Comprehensive risk assessment
Business continuity software is the technological element of BCM, the holistic management process of identifying potential threats to an organization and the impacts to business operations that those threats, if realized, might cause.
And central to BCM are analyses and assessments that define the impacts of disruption over time to determine an organization’s response, recovery priorities, and resource requirements as well as identify the disruption risks to an organization’s critical business activities.
Business continuity software digitizes and simplifies those oft-manual processes to drive a higher level of engagement that ensures that risk analyses are rich with insightful data to help organizations truly understand how its business works.
Business continuity software also helps organizations quickly identify dependencies between business activities and supporting assets or vendors, keeping stakeholders informed when one is at risk.
Digitization, here, enables teams to visualize and track dependencies to make more informed decisions and take appropriate actions to mitigate risks effectively, e.g., implementing redundant systems, fortifying cybersecurity measures, or diversifying supply chains.
2. Dynamic planning
In BCM, the results of these risk analyses feed into the business continuity plan (BCP). The BCP outlines all of the predetermined instructions or procedures that need to be enacted during a disruption to sustain an organization’s mission/business processes. The purpose of this is to preemptively outline roles, responsibilities, and communication channels to minimize confusion and streamline the response effort.
Business continuity software, in its turn, serves an important preparatory function by replacing paper-based, static BCPs with dynamic, digitized plans. These BCPs are then made available to all company’s users, on any mobile device.
To what end? Well, digitizing plans serves the following three-fold purpose:
- Keeping those plans more physically secure (e.g., out of fire danger or prying hands)
- Ensuring that they are not forgotten and therefore are always kept up to date
- Rendering them easily accessible to employees who will be called on to aid the response
3. Real-time visibility into readiness
Of course, people aren’t the only “resources” that companies use to manage disruption. They might also require equipment (digital or physical) and/or facilities. To ensure these resources are deployed efficiently during a disruption, organizations must keep track of them before a disruption happens.
Business continuity software, here, digitizes and centralizes the important resource management function. Company assets can be tracked, with technology providing real-time visibility into potential vulnerabilities, risks, and gaps, thereby enabling timely action.
Following this, workflows, during an actual disruption, can help organizations optimize how these resources are deployed to minimize downtime.
4. Stakeholder engagement
However, human assets, i.e., workers and contractors, will be running the show during an actual disruption. A high-pressure moment, if ever there was one.
Everyone will need to be able to communicate to collaborate effectively during the response. They simply can’t afford to be overwhelmed by a slew of emails or forced to retain the contents of off-the-cuff conversations.
Business continuity software facilitates the requisite level of engagement and collaboration across all stakeholders. How, exactly? Powerful workflows streamline real-time notifications, for example, to ensure effective coordination of continuity efforts.
5. Exercise management
It goes without saying that all of these preparatory measures have to be tested before a disruption actually happens.
Across the industry, though, research suggests that exercises (1) aren’t being completed frequently enough, (2) on a sufficient scale, and (3) that exercise management programs are failing to prioritize complex disruption scenarios. The end-result: businesses aren’t as prepared for disruption as they think.
Fortunately, business continuity software can help. Relevant functionality lets stakeholders test the effectiveness of the business continuity program through exercises and facilitates continuous improvement from lesson learned and insights to refine strategies and processes.
These solutions leave you confident that your team is prepared to handle any situation.
6. Regulatory compliance
Although business continuity isn’t operational resilience (OpRes), the growing number of OpRes regulations – from APRA 230 to DORA to relevant Bank of England policies – is becoming a business continuity matter in and of itself.
Indeed, failure to comply with statutes can create a disruption. And so, it’s no surprise that changes in legislation and regulation ranks in the top five of top business risks, according to the Allianz Risk Barometer 2024.
How can business continuity software prepare your business for disruption on this score?
The software provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities, e.g., the ability to create custom reports that summarize historical data with the help of charts, recommendations, and automated approvals. This functionality is often critical in demonstrating commitment to resilience and accountability to regulators.
BCM software a need to have to prepare for disruption
As BCM has become increasingly proactive, business continuity software has become ever more important for preparing organizations to manage disruption with speed, agility, and accuracy.
Convinced but not certain senior-management will buy in? We lay out the ROI of Business Continuity Management Software in this guide.
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