From regional war to major IT outages, the last few years have been a wild ride. And with no signs of slowing down, it's important for business resilience tools to keep up.
Indeed, the proliferation of crises in recent memory has pushed business continuity software providers to innovate to develop solutions that can adequately mitigate the increasing business continuity risk organizations are facing.
What’s on the horizon? In the following, we examine the business continuity (BC) software trends to watch for this year.
Business continuity software capabilities
What’s business continuity software delivering now, though?
Right now, it’s business continuity software, as an upgrade from manual business continuity, that’s making the detection of holes in business continuity management systems not only simpler but possible.
Traditionally, BC software has helped businesses plan for and recover from disruption. But beyond that, business continuity software has been providing the following benefits:
Streamlines business continuity planning
BCM software streamlines the business continuity planning (BCP) process, making it more efficient and accurate.
Enhanced risk assessment
BCM software helps businesses identify potential risks and recognize possible negative impact.
Expedited incident 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 and transparency
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.
Themes in business continuity software innovation
This is quite a value proposition as it stands. Nevertheless, no market remains static. And the business continuity software market is no different.
We’ve been seeing unprecedented advances. The innovations, as many analysts have summarized, have centered on the following themes:
- Modernization of methodologies and tools in the provision of business continuity services, using new technologies such as analytics and workflows to anticipate and identify trends as well as prevent situations that may generate an interruption.
- Greater process automation of consulting and advisory processes in business continuity management, particularly of tasks that were formerly carried out manually, to improve efficiency and generate significant savings in response, recovery, and restoration times.
- Greater agility in the implementation of programs, plans, and projects, to enable greater client self-management, self-improvement, and commitment to obtaining results.
Business continuity software trends this year
Here are the trends we think will come to fruition this year:
1. The rise of the centralized workspace for business resilience
A key platform capability that’s emerged and will continue to get better in years to come is the ability to replace multiple systems with one comprehensive business resilience workspace.
What does that business resilience workspace do? As the name suggests, the workspace not only manages business continuity management but also inter-related solution areas, which have often been siloed off from BCM; those include work safety, security, emergency and disaster management, incident management, and risk.
Why does it matter? An integrated platform, by eliminating the need for multiple systems, offers customers, irrespective of their size and vertical market, offers a comprehensive approach to business continuity and resilience.
Furthermore, the innovation enables customers to remain resilient to the volatile business environment by expanding into areas of operation seamlessly while still managing a wholly integrated business continuity management program on a common information foundation.
2. Integrations made easier
In addition, this year will see the full fruition of business continuity software platforms with a full range of integration options.
Boasting Integrations Centers, these solutions will play increasingly well with other resilience-enhancing technologies, through the easy connection and synchronization of data.
Import, export, and API capabilities, in particular, will ensure that customers can always get their data when and where they need it, and that they can plug in their own systems (e.g., single-sign on, messaging, and mapping) into the platform.
3. Software getting organizations up and running faster than ever
Building a better mouse trap can be easy. It’s getting organizations up and running quickly and efficiently that’s been an industry bug bear.
Not this year. We’ll see the continued rise of platforms that come equipped with no-code designer tools, to create or modify workspaces without a single line of code.
For increased agility, these platforms offer responsive user interfaces that enable customers to design forms and workspaces once and then to access the same information and features across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
4. More powerful workflows
Automation is the name of the game. And it will only get better as more customers get access to more powerful workflow engines that allow Business Continuity Managers to automate business continuity processes and build their own workflows, including notifications, business rules, approvals, and much more.
What are some relevant capabilities we’ll see? They include:
- Automated business impact analysis (BIA) reports, business continuity plans (BCPs), and recovery-strategies’ approval process
- Automated notifications to prioritized business activity owners whenever the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is changed on a business asset their activity is dependent on
- Pre-configured workflow for incident escalations. Once an incident is created, and the severity changes from Critical, High, Medium to Low, different voice messages, emails, and SMS notifications are triggered.
- And once a BIA or exercise is completed, the next one is automatically scheduled, removing the risk the user will forget it.
5. BCPs getting more dynamic
Business continuity planning is mainstay functionality for BC software, often enough called business continuity planning software.
Next year, though, we’ll see the increased popularization of platforms that have been designed to function as plans themselves.
That means that when customers need to develop BCPs, all the data they have previously entered into the system seamlessly comes together. As a result of this, BC Managers don’t have to go sifting through documents to find the data they need. And the risk of someone referencing an out-of-date BCP during a crisis is removed.
What’s more, because the BCP is in the platform, multiple stakeholders can collaborate on the plan, which enables better engagement across the organization. All data associated with building the BCP is managed centrally, in a controlled way.
6. Enhanced exercise management
We’ll also see corresponding improvements on the testing and exercise management fronts.
Dashboards will navigate users and their teams through each stage of an exercise, ensuring everyone understands what needs to be completed and when.
From there, the platform’s automation capabilities will ensure the correct teams and/or personnel are invited to participate in the exercise and receive regular updates via automated notifications throughout the exercise.
Once the exercise is activated, all users will easily see what type of exercise is being completed. Based upon the affected assets/activities, the recovery strategies required for the affected assets will automatically be populated for the team.
7. Software delivering a fuller picture of relationships
With risk (third-party and supplier risk including) becoming more prolific, heterogeneous, and complex, dependency mapping, a core business continuity function, provides the very means to manage information overload, enabling organizations to identify and prioritize what matters most in a way that’s digestible.
However, some providers only present a narrow view of prioritized activities’ dependencies. To gain a fuller picture, users have had to navigate away from original context to other dashboards.
Not anymore. Software will help users easily visualize relationships and depeƒndencies across their organization, thanks to powerful digital tools for visualizing relationships.
Resilience teams, whether they be in Business Continuity, Operational Resilience, Third-Party or Operational Risk Management, will finally get a clear picture of what matters most to their organization and associated dependencies to develop viable resilience strategies and make the right decisions when a business disruption occurs.
Don’t wait to take advantage of these business continuity software trends, though. Some software providers are ahead of the curve.
Noggin, for instance, enables organizations to be prepared for adverse events and disruptions, whether this year or any year.
Taking a streamlined, integrated, and automated approach to business continuity management, that’s well ahead of its time, Noggin facilitates engagement and collaboration across all stakeholders and ensures a unified approach to resilience.
But don’t just take our word for it. See Noggin in action for yourself in a tailored software demonstration.
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