Business Continuity
Business Continuity
Our risk advisory practice helps organizations achieve a sustainable business continuity management program with the flexibility and tools to prepare for and respond to major disruptions fluidly, maximizing security, integrity and availability of your IT investments.
Business continuity management services
Today’s organizations face a host of risks that can impact business processes and supporting technologies. These disruptions are costly - from revenue and productivity loss to customer loss and reputational harm. When these disruptions occur, timely recovery and restoration of business operations are critical. An integrated business continuity management (BCM) program - one built to adapt and respond to a complex and changing risk landscape - provides sustainable oversight, thoughtful preparation and rigorous tools to handle an unexpected crisis.
In addition to helping organizations establish and develop a comprehensive BCM program, our specialists also provide a full range of business continuity services.
Business continuity program assessment
- Program initiation and management
- Risk assessment
- Business impact analysis (BIA)
- Business continuity strategies
- Incident response
- Plan development and implementation
- Awareness and training programs
- Business continuity plan exercise, assessment and maintenance
- Crisis communications
- Coordination with external agencies
Disaster recovery plan audit or assessment
- Agility and granularity
- Alignment with recovery strategy/business continuity plan
- Recovery and restoration procedures
- Vendor/Cloud provider dependencies
- Validation and testing
- Plan maintenance
- Primary and backup data centers
- Plan maturity
Business continuity and enterprise risk management “after-action review”
Post-incident assessment including gap analysis:
- Roles and responsibilities analysis
- Decision-making, timeline and process analyses
- Reporting and recommendations
Third-party, supply chain or other services
- Internal audit – vendor management and supply chain
- SOC for Supply Chain
- Oversight reviews
- Vendor and supply chain due diligence
- Tabletop exercises (including cybersecurity)
- Incident response exercise
An integrated approach
Our risk advisory practice helps organizations achieve a sustainable business continuity program with the flexibility and tools to prepare for and respond to major disruptions fluidly, maximizing security, integrity and availability of your assets and information. We take into account all stakeholders as part of the planning process, including: board, audit committee, executive leadership and management, media, customers, partners, suppliers and employees.
- Establish the need for BCM
- Obtain leadership and management support
- Define program objectives and structure
- Establish clear communication channels and disseminate across the organization
- Gain agreement on risk assessment and tolerance
- Conduct information gathering activities to develop risk universe
- Evaluate impacts of risks related to availability of personnel, information technology and communication
- Identify and evaluate effectiveness of controls and safeguards
- Establish process and methodology to capture and evaluate the potential business impacts of a disruption
- Determine recovery priorities for business processes and minimum resource requirements to recover
- Identify gaps between current recovery capabilities and business requirement
- Develop the chain-of-command and organizational structure need to support recovery efforts
- Identify and document recovery strategies and actions to effectively respond and recover from a disruption event
- Establish clear roles / responsibilities for executing recovery strategies
- Develop communication plan and protocols
- Develop role-based training for personnel tasked with response and recovery procedures
- Conduct broader awareness campaigns for employees effected by business continuity strategies
- Define testing approaches and frequency of occurrence
- Establish standards for the continual review and maintenance of all program and planning documentation
- Develop tabletop and testing roadmap
Business continuity planning checklist
Business continuity planning can seem overwhelming when you first think about all you need to cover. Use this overview checklist to assist your organization in preparing for its planning process.
