According to the Uptime Institute, the number of outages costing over $100,000 has increased in recent years. We can think of recent IT outages which have led to even steeper losses, including significant business downtime. How then can business continuity management software prevent these outages from happening and limit business downtime should they occur? We delve into the capabilities in the following article.
IT outages becoming more ubiquitous
Indeed, IT outages and brownouts, a temporary drop in voltage in an electrical power system, also known as a voltage dip or sag, have become so common as to become ubiquitous.
According to industry survey data, 97% of enterprises experienced an IT brownout, over the past three years. Meanwhile, no fewer than 94% of enterprises experienced an IT outage in that same time period.
The costs of IT downtime
The costs of these event can be astronomical.
In late 2022, Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) published a survey on server reliability that put the cost of IT downtime at a minimum of $5,000 a minute. About 44% of those polled put costs at $16,700 per server/per minute or $1 million an hour.
Some of the biggest IT outages ever recorded came with price tags well in the billions. Such is the toll from days-long incidents which halt transportation, shutter businesses, even stop markets.
The need to procure business continuity management software
Of course, incidents of this kind prompt reflection in the way we conduct business continuity – at least they should.
One of the key lessons learned across the industry is the need to procure systems to help the business plan for and recover from emergencies and disruptions. That kind of system is conventionally called business continuity management (BCM) software.
BCM software makes the detection of holes in business continuity processes not only simpler but possible.
But beyond helping businesses plan for and recover from disruptions such as IT outages, BCM software offers the following benefits:
- Business continuity planning. BCM software streamlines the business continuity planning (BCP) process, making it more efficient and accurate.
- Risk assessment. BCM software helps businesses identify potential risks and recognize possible negative impact.
- Expedited response. BCM software helps businesses respond to threats effectively and quickly react to disruptions.
- Enhanced data protection. BCM software helps businesses protect data.
- Improved visibility. BCM software helps promote information sharing with senior management.
- BCM software combines business continuity planning for operations, IT disaster recovery, crisis management, and incident recovery services to ensure integrated resilience.
Ways in which business continuity management software can prevent business downtime
However, these are the generic benefits of business continuity management software. How exactly can these solutions prevent IT outages from occurring or mitigate their effects should they happen?
From a review of lessons learned from recent IT outages, here’s what we think:
Update business continuity plans accordingly
The best-practice guidance says to update BCPs at least once a year or after a major business disruption. Recent IT outages, for many organizations, will qualify as major business disruptions.
How can BCM software help? These solutions replace paper-based, static business continuity plans with dynamic, digitized business continuity plans.
In turn, that digitization helps ensure plans are always up-to-date and quickly available for all users, on any device.
Test BCPs once they’ve been updated
And once plans have been updated following major business disruptions, they should be tested, as well. Here, business continuity management software can really shine.
Using the new digital transformation technologies of analytics and workflows, these solutions help businesses:
- Better anticipate and identify trends
- Prevent situations that may generate an interruption
- Respond more efficiently to disruptions that do arise.
What’s more, exercise dashboards within BCM software navigate users and their teams through each phase of an exercise, ensuring everyone understands what needs to be completed and when.
From there, the software’s automation capabilities ensure the correct teams and/or personnel are invited to participate in the exercise and receive regular updates via automated notifications throughout the exercise.
Maintain transparency and clear communication
To cap it all off, built-in communication and collaboration tools, e.g., chat, email, SMS, and voice messages,
make it easy to collaborate in real time, better coordinate responses, and keep everyone informed.
Integrate IT and business risks
There’s often a siloing of IT from the rest of the business. BCM for IT is considered tactical; the rest is strategic.
But when an IT outage shuts down business operations, you see just how strategic IT can be, with potential delays in critical business processes, lower operational efficiency, lower financial outcomes, reputational damage, and reduced customer satisfaction.
Streamlined, integrated, and automated business continuity management, here, can facilitate engagement and collaboration across all stakeholders, ensuring a unified approach to resilience.
Mitigate third-party risk
As recent IT outages have demonstrated, not all business risk comes from the business itself. Increasingly, risk comes from the third-party relationships businesses are forming.
They enter these relationships for productivity and efficiency gains. However, third-party incidents, which are becoming ever more common, pose substantial business continuity risk to the home organizations.
What can software do? Working in a unified resilience workspace, where business continuity and third-party risk management capabilities are integrated, equips teams to pinpoint and address the top issues across the vendor ecosystem, thereby preventing business downtime resulting from a third-party incident.
Part of it is basic risk management, i.e., proactively identifying and assessing risks at a service level, identifying and implementing controls, and monitoring on an ongoing basis to manage vendor risks.
Assure supply-chain resilience
Another piece of it is simply understanding supply chain dependencies. How to do so? Consider concentration risks by reviewing dependency mapping.
What’s that?
Dependency mapping is identifying, documenting, and understanding the chain of activities involved in delivering important or critical business services.
To map dependencies comprehensively, an organization identifies, documents, and (yes) visually maps the necessary people, processes, information, technologies, facilities, and third-party service providers required to deliver each of its important or critical business services.
Can business continuity management software help? No doubt about it.
Enhanced relationship map functionality can enhance an organization’s ability to develop viable resilience strategies and make the right decisions when a business disruption occurs.
For instance, a relationship map can reveal that a key supplier is a single point of failure for a critical product line.
Such insight then enables the business to seek additional suppliers or develop contingency plans, ultimately mitigating the risk of supply-chain disruption.
Finally, in lieu of recent IT outages, businesses must keep focusing on building integrated resilience.
For that reason, their business continuity plans and programs can never remain static. But constant evaluation and improvement require innovative business continuity management software.
Where to turn to stay ahead of the curve? We think Noggin.
Streamlined, integrated, and automated business continuity management, Noggin enables organizations to be prepared for adverse events, including IT outages, by facilitating engagement and collaboration across all stakeholders.
Don’t just take our word for it, though. See Noggin for yourself in a software demonstration.
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