Unparalleled Business Continuity Management Services

Understanding the Business Continuity Management Framework

Like any other type of business models and processes, Business Continuity Management (BCM) is structured on a framework, and this enables an organization to execute and implement the necessary strategies that apply to their business and its operations. There are several layers to a BCM Framework, but essentially, this outline is a progressive plan that covers all the bases of an organization’s processes.

• Policies and Strategies determine the scope and range of what “business continuity” means to the company or organization. As the first phase in the BCM Framework, the policies and strategies that are critical to the operations of a business have to be identified, and this includes designating key personnel responsible for building and improving on the organization’s business continuity plans. At the core of business continuity is ensuring that all applications are in working order, stored data is accessible, and hardware, such as a server, are protected whenever a threat to operations exists.  
• Business Impact and Assessment can be perceived as a cataloging process that intends to narrow down the acceptable amount of data that an organization can lose in the unfortunate event of a natural disaster, system crash, or cyber-attack. This phase includes determining the data in-store, its location, the process involved in mining, and its accessibility. Knowing these is crucial in identifying which of these digital assets have to be taken care of the most, thus allowing the organization or the point-of-contact an accurate figure of allowable data loss.
• Risk Assessment covers the consideration of all potential threats to the organization and its operations. This may include looking at a heavily fluctuating market, for instance, or the enterprise’s key people, and usually, comprehending the competition’s capacity and quality standards. The broadness of possible risks can be disconcerting, but listing down and pinning down all the risks that could damage the organization is necessary to ensuring business continuity. Once all these risks have been listed down and contextualized, ranking them according to the impact they carry will allow the organization to create solutions for these issues.
• Validation and Testing are the processes required of an enterprise so they can zero in on the significance of the proposed solutions, which then serve to mitigate the impact of possible risks to business continuity. It is necessary for an organization to constantly have an overview of the potential threats. And the varying levels of damage that these risks carry have to be measured and tested, respectively, and the outlined plans to mitigate these also have to be evaluated for an organization to know they can be implemented.
• Incident Identification is the part of the BCM Framework that serves to determine what the enterprise considers as an incident, as an “incident” is an event that is likely to trigger the business continuity plan. These events are to be documented as policy, and these policies should also have a corresponding POC tasked to call for the business continuity plan, or take immediate action whenever an incident occurs.
• Disaster Recovery is the deployment of personnel and solutions when an incident has taken place. While business continuity covers all the bases, such as leading operations and establishing policies, DR is the answer to the issues that the BC failed to anticipate or control.

Axcient is Your BC/DR Solution

Heavy data loss kills businesses. Take, for instance, how 60 percent of SMBs find their selves closing shop within six months after an attack. And we understand how important a few lost hours due to downtime can be to an enterprise, whether it’s for the short- or long-term, as the slightest hiccup can turn off even the most loyal of clients and consumers. Your credibility and reputation as a brand can easily disintegrate when your systems, servers, or applications encounter frequent downtime – and before you notice it, client retention has already started to dwindle. Word-of-mouth reviews and negative social media posts can spread like wildfire, and allowing these risks to exist will only cost you more in the long run – that is if you survive.

This is where our business continuity management consulting services excel the most: to either put out those fires before it ravages your system, or entirely prevent the match from even lighting up.

Business continuity management is all about cementing your operations; from data protection to ensuring the integrity of your products and services. It preserves an organization and its culture by cultivating its strength, so that when catastrophe strikes, there are no losses substantial enough to bring it down.