If you’ve ever sought out to simplify your business continuity planning (BCP) and business continuity management (BCM) processes, you understand the importance of business continuity software. But what are the key benefits of business continuity software to the firms that procure it? The subsequent article will lay them out.
What is business continuity software?
But first, what exactly is business continuity software?
These are the applications or suite of applications designed to make BCP and BCM processes more efficient.
More specifically, business continuity software, which is widely used in every major sector that’s embraced digitization, helps organizations to conduct core tasks like the business impact analysis (BIA) and the creation and updating of recovery plans with more accuracy and buy-in.
Indeed, this has been a remarkable departure.
Of the major fields concerned with resilience management, business continuity management has often been considered the least digitized.
Practitioners, in fact, have long decried this lack of technological development. Which had been one of the perennial challenges to garnering greater executive interest in business continuity programs.
Thanks to advances in the field, like powerful workflows, this is no longer the case. For those who want it, advanced business continuity software platforms streamline BCM processes, making it easier for everyone in the company to engage and contribute.
With what features, though? Business continuity software, though not uniform, often boast the following capabilities.
Core capabilities of business continuity management software
Business impact analysis
These are the tools that provide a step-by-step process to identify critical activities, objectively determine maximum periods of disruption, assess the risk and impact of disruptions, collect and document recommendations, and report across your business.
Incident and exercise management
These are the tools to manage incidents and run exercises as well as record post-incident reviews and lessons learned to improve your response.
Recovery strategy tracking
These tools help highlight any critical activities, processes, assets, and resources lacking recovery strategies, or untested recovery strategies that put your business at risk.
Critical dependencies tracking
These tools help quickly identify dependencies between business activities and supporting assets or vendors.
Features alone don’t explain the benefits of business continuity software. So, what exactly are the benefits?
Benefits of business continuity software
Here are the four key benefits of business continuity management software:
1. Enable analysis of impact to business activities
As noted, the BIA remains a core business continuity task. However, teams around the business who must feed critical information to make the BIA happen often remain aloof. They find the exercise too academic and time consuming.
With fully configurable workflows that automate and lead people through BIA procedures, business continuity software streamlines the entire process. This ensures that the right inputs are there.
Meanwhile, platforms with the capability to assign and track business impact assessments and risk management activities ensure that all business unit owners are involved and engaged throughout the process.
2. Enhanced incident management
Businesses, despite their best efforts at preparation, will inevitably face disruptions. How they deal with these disruptions often proves the difference between business viability and failure.
Business continuity software, as a result, can be of great business value, enabling teams to report and manage all business continuity incidents and issues in a single flexible platform.
A benefit of crisis management software, with which business continuity software can be integrated, teams react quickly to disruption.
That is thanks to digital capabilities enabling them to monitor and generate incident response tasks, log and share updates, decisions, facts, and assumptions, produce situation reports, as well as collaborate with teams for each event.
3. Effortless escalation from disruption to crisis
Those same features help when businesses face disruption that escalate into crises and/or critical events. Typically, businesses respond to these two categories of incidents using different tools, which often result in time lost or data missing.
However, having a single integrated platform with a common information foundation helps make the task of responding to crises that have evolved from disruptions more seamless.
The same can be said for winding down crises and returning to business as usual. This is also a benefit of emergency management software.
4. Expedited compliance
So much of business continuity is compliance management, whether complying with external regulations, internal strictures, or international standards like ISO 22301.
Compliance without digitization isn’t simple, though. In fact, its innate difficulty often effects the very quality of compliance measures.
Business continuity software, though, can expedite compliance, thanks to audit logging of changes and approvals, notifications for when exercises are due /overdue, and dashboards with all upcoming and recently completed exercises. This is also a benefit of safety management software and a benefit of security management software.
Not only that, but business continuity software can also help drive improvements, which guarantee compliance is maintained even as regulations, internal policies, and standards evolve.
Practical uses of business continuity software
But how do organizations use business continuity software in furtherance of business goals?
One such entity, a prominent university in the U.K., required a specialist business continuity management system to tackle occasional incidents as well as complex continuity planning requirements, pandemic tracking, and its University-wide risk management system.
Given the nature of the use cases, multiple entities within the University would make use of the solution, too; and so, it would have to be easy to use.
The University eventually tapped a business continuity management software provider who provided a modular approach to business continuity management. Modules, such as travel risk management, were adapted to address University requirements with the opportunity of creating newer Modules as the University adapted its approach to business continuity.
Given its level of customization, the business continuity software solution provides the University with a high level of usability for all personnel who rely upon it.
Not only that, but the solution has also yielded cost savings. Once centrally procured, different teams have been able to use the system for free instead of purchasing their own separate management systems.
So, how do you get these business benefits for your own firm? Well, with Noggin’s platform for business continuity and operational resilience, you can be confident and prepared.
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