The DECIMAL CS Business Continuity Management Application enables you to effectively plan and manage your BCM and crisis management processes. The BCM Application provides a highly configurable system to manage your business continuity needs, including analyzing the impact of business continuity risks, creating and testing business continuity plans, and initiating and managing disaster recovery activities. The Application also connects the BCM program with the enterprise risk management model, while streamlining and automating BCM workflows for optimal efficiency.
Features
Supports qualitative and quantitative assessments of business continuity risks for key processes and assets; provides a comprehensive view of risks across geographies
Triggers BIA surveys to identify critical assets and processes; enables automated and cumulative criticality scoring; supports business process modeling to map RTO and RPO dependencies
Enables a systematic approach to business continuity planning; helps define recovery paths and timelines using Gantt charts; provides a virtual playground to test recovery scenarios, and perform exercises
Captures crisis updates from authoritative feeds and social media; maps data to organizational assets to assess crisis impact; tracks incident remediation tasks and status in real time
Supports the creation and management of emergency caller trees and lists, as well as notification templates; triggers automated notifications during a crisis
Provides a native mobile BCM Application for iOS and Android devices with both online and offline access to business continuity and disaster recovery plans; supports crisis reporting
Incorporates an extensive range of BCM frameworks and standards, including ISO 22301:2012 and ITIL V3
Benefits
- Manage BCM and disaster recovery programs and efforts from one, centralized platform
- Build a robust business continuity and disaster recovery plan aligned with key industry standards and frameworks
- Gain timely, in-depth visibility into business continuity risks through a world-class analytics engine and graphical dashboards
- Clearly define and map processes with MTTD, RTO, and RPO objectives
- Enable real-time situational awareness through integration with authoritative feeds, alerts, and emergency mass notifications
- Access business continuity plans anytime, anywhere through mobile devices.
Protect Your Business Operations Against Unforeseen Disasters with Decimal’s Business Continuity Management System
When calamity occurs, it is too late to determine the critical processes your firm requires to continue core operations. Decimal’s BCM (Business Continuity Management) Services provides specific methods for safeguarding business processes, equipment, and human resources.
Business continuity and disaster recovery is the first step toward establishing business resiliency. These solutions are an excellent place to start if your company hasn’t yet identified business continuity and risk management strategies. At Decimal, we help your organization to achieve this.
Decimal’s business crisis management services help organizations to:
- Identify core business functions and potential business risks
- Assess the impact of disruption caused due to any disaster
- Maintain the uptime requirements for smooth operations
What is business continuity plan?
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document that details how a company will continue to operate in the event of an unanticipated service outage. It is more complete than a disaster recovery plan in that it includes countermeasures for business processes, assets, human resources, and business partners – in other words, any component of the business that could be affected.
A checklist of supplies and equipment, data backups, and backup site locations is generally included in plans. Plan administrators can also be identified, and contact information for emergency responders, critical individuals, and backup site providers can be included. Plans may include specific methods for maintaining business operations during both short-term and long-term disruptions.
A disaster recovery plan, which includes strategies for dealing with IT interruptions to networks, servers, personal computers, and mobile devices, is an important component of a business continuity plan (BCP).
The strategy should include how to restore business productivity and enterprise software in order to meet critical company needs. The plan should include manual workarounds so that operations can continue until computer networks can be reinstated.
A business continuity strategy for critical programs and processes consists of three major components:
- High availability: Provide the capacity and processes that allow a business to access apps despite local failures. These failures could occur in business processes, physical buildings, or IT hardware or software.
- Continuous operations: Protect the ability to keep things running in the event of an interruption as well as during planned downtime such as scheduled backups or scheduled maintenance.
- Disaster recovery: Plan for the recovery of a data center in a different location if a disaster destroys or otherwise leaves the primary site unworkable.
What is included in business continuity services?
Business Continuity Planning
Create a plan to keep your business operating in the face of adversity. Decimal can help you map out a strategy for meeting SLAs. Mitigation (avoiding disruptions via robust system design) and contingency planning are the two primary bases for strategies (managing outages as they occur).
Decimal also assists in the planning of a strategy to detect and declare a disaster, allowing you to immediately implement your business continuity disaster recovery plan.
Business Impact Analysis
Start strengthening your company’s ability to withstand hardship. Decimal collaborates with you to pinpoint mission-critical activities, investigate the specific dangers of your facilities or operations, assess the severity of a potential outage, and formulate a plan for business continuity.
Consequences of deficient business continuity planning
It is impossible to know when a tragedy will occur, but being prepared with a business continuity plan is essential for keeping a company afloat. Business profits are easily dampened in today’s digital economy, and natural disasters that disrupt operations have a chilling effect on economic activity. This is especially accurate for companies whose main source of income is the provision of online services. Think about these numbers:
- Large companies might lose millions of dollars due to even brief periods of outage. As per a report in Veeam, the average yearly loss due to downtime and data loss was as high as $21.8 million for a mid-sized company in 2017.
- 66% of businesses admit that data loss and outages impede their digital transformation efforts. At the same time, 40% admit outage hurt their brand reputation severely.
- As per reports published by the Ponemon Institute, every minute of downtime might cause a business an average of $7,900 in lost revenue.
What type of events do business continuity plans make you prepare for?
Disruptions in digital businesses can be caused by a variety of factors. Though you may be safe from a specific calamity, that doesn’t mean you’re immune to the many other things that could put you out of business, briefly, if not permanently. Even the largest IT corporations face such issues. However, their IT service continuity management plan saves them from major threats and disruptions.
Here are some of the errors that might cause significant damage to your business and organization.
Natural and artificial disasters
Natural calamities like floods, earthquakes, and fires can obviously cause data loss and system failure, but even a simple technological error could erase crucial data. Keeping all of your data in one location is a dangerous gamble.
Network issues
Internet service providers aren’t infallible. Fibers can be snipped. Disabling your home LAN is an option. Maintaining network uptime should be a key concern for any enterprise that relies on constant connectivity.
Cybersecurity
No company, no matter how big or small, can afford to overlook the worldwide phenomena that are the emergence of cybersecurity risks. An increase in the prevalence of new threats like Ransomware is widely anticipated. To prevent these kinds of attacks from bringing down your organization, it is essential to regularly back up your data and make the systems and networks secure.
Human mistakes
Sometimes your organization might have an ill-trained employee who proves to be the weak link. Incompetence, accidental mistakes, or malicious intent on the part of either employees or vendors are all potential causes of disruptions triggered by humans.
Steps for Building and Executing Your Business Continuity Plan
Your company can get help catching up on emergency preparations if it’s fallen behind. To begin safeguarding your organization against unscheduled downtime, you should take the following three steps with or without the help of a third party. Before deploying a risk management plan, it’s essential to follow these steps.
Step 1: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis
This analysis will determine what information your organization cannot function without and how much downtime can be tolerated.
Having a hosting company that guarantees 100% uptime is a good first step, but you’ll also need to set a Recovery Time Objective and a Recovery Point Objective.
Step 2: Perform a Risk Assessment
The second phase, a risk assessment, is crucial if you are in charge of managing your own infrastructure. The purpose of any risk assessment is to single out potential weak spots.
For instance, if all of your data is kept in a single repository and that repository suddenly goes offline, you will lose all of your data. If a third party manages your servers and data within a data center, you should ensure that everything is backed up and kept in many locations.
If your service provider has a clear SLA, you can rest easier knowing that interruptions will be kept to a minimum.
Step 3: Manage Your Risks
After identifying potential threats, the next step is to implement business continuity risk management countermeasures. It does not matter whether your data and infrastructure are stored in-house, with a hosting provider, or somewhere in between.
In addition to doing off-site backups on a regular basis as outlined in your business continuity strategy, you should also consider incorporating off-site, redundant infrastructure into your network to guarantee a continuous stream of service.
What are the major components of a successful business continuity plan?
Here are the components of a business continuity management framework. This framework is almost similar to BCP for almost all businesses.
Strategy: Things that have to do with the methods by which the company goes about its regular operations.
Organization: Matters associated with the organization’s personnel, including their composition, training, means of communication, and roles.
Information and software: Things that have to do with the software that’s utilized to run a company and how that software is made available to users.
Processes: Things that are vital to running the organization and the IT procedures that guarantee their smooth functioning are included.
Technology: Things associated with the infrastructure, communications, and vertically-focused tech must be in place to guarantee the reliability of application and data backups round the clock.
Facilities: Items associated with having a backup location ready in case the main one is ruined
Build a More Resilient Business with Decimal
We assist businesses in developing a BC strategy by evaluating their current processes and their reliance on external systems. Additionally, we create a comprehensive picture of the risk exposure and implement remedial measures to cut down on wasteful costs.
While other agencies’ service continuity management and plans include minimum security evaluations and covering, Decimal provides security as a separate service to focus exclusively on creating rugged security measures.
Decimal’s business continuity management software
There is a wide variety of BCM software available in the market. They all differ in terms of use, scope, and functions.
Back-up
One easy approach to keep operations going is to back up data. While backing up data off-site or on a remote drive does help ensure some level of business continuity, further measures must be taken to ensure the IT infrastructure can continue to operate in the case of a disaster.
Backup as a Service
A similar concept to offsite backups, Backup as a Service involves outsourcing the backup process to a third party. Once again, only data is backed up and not the underlying network or server hardware.
Instant Recovery Copies
Sometimes called “snapshots,” these copies are made of the complete database at predetermined intervals. Instant recovery copies are snapshots of whole virtual computers, just like point-in-time copies. Data can be recovered from backups if they are kept in a safe location or on a virtual machine that was not damaged in the incident.
Cold Site
After a major calamity, such as an earthquake or fire, businesses can set up a secondary location, called a “cold site,” where personnel can continue their job. In order for a firm to keep running, a cold site must be combined with other disaster recovery strategies that either prevent data loss or make it possible to recover it.
Hot Site
In contrast to a “cold site,” where data is kept out of reach and out of date, a “hot site” is an identical but separate location for conducting business. Although hot sites drastically decrease downtime, they are more costly and take longer to set up than cold sites.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
In the event of a disaster, a DRaaS provider will migrate a client’s data and computing resources to its own cloud. This service can be purchased by businesses on a subscription basis or on a pay-as-you-go basis.
With DRaaS, even if a company loses access to its own servers, it may continue to run smoothly at the location of its DRaaS provider. Local DRaaS providers often have higher latency, but their servers could be at risk if they are located too close to the disaster zone.
Physical Tools
Some natural disasters can be lessened with the use of physical disaster recovery equipment, but cyber attacks cannot. Tools for extinguishing fires, which can save data and computers, and backup generators, which can keep operations running during brief power outages, are two examples of the kinds of physical factors that can aid in maintaining a company’s ability to carry on normal operations.
Virtualization
One of the trickiest aspects of a business continuity strategy is backing up an IT system. Backups of a company’s whole computing environment are difficult to come by, but virtualization is one of the few techniques to ensure they exist.
Some disaster recovery procedures can also be automated on off-site virtual machines that are immune to physical calamities, allowing businesses to quickly restore services. For virtualization to function as an efficient disaster recovery technique, data and workloads must be frequently transferred between hosts.
There needs to be a crystal-clear and up-to-date count of all the virtual machines in use at any one time by the IT department.
What does Decimal’s business continuity plan mitigate?
There are several ways in which the negative effects of an unanticipated business disruption can be mitigated with a suitable and well-tested BCP.
Financial impact
Sales and income can be adversely affected by interruptions in product supply chains and essential customer services. The costs incurred by a company to restore operations and counteract dangers that were not anticipated during the disruption’s downtime might be substantial.
Brand impact
Damage to the company’s reputation and the loss of valuable customers might result from a delay in resuming normal operations and the delivery of the goods or services that consumers have come to expect. The financial impact of a business disruption can be exacerbated if investors and other sources of funding draw back after a hit to the company’s reputation.
Regulatory impact
When firms don’t handle interruptions properly, they risk receiving complaints from customers and suppliers, which could lead to regulatory inspection or penalties. Business continuity planning is essential in highly regulated sectors like the energy and financial services industries to ensure regulatory compliance.
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