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Organisations today face an increased range of critical dependencies and risks. Continuity of products and services in the event of disruptions cannot be taken for granted. It requires a clear understanding of critical processes, a strong operational resilience framework, and well-exercised Business Continuity plans to minimise the impact during incidents.
What is Business Continuity Management?
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a set of policies and processes designed to ensure an organisation can maintain minimal viable service – during a major disruption. The overall objective is to ensure that organisations can uphold critical operations at a tolerable predefined level, regardless of the disruption or its timing.
BCM policies and processes are not reactive, but rather proactive measures that are put into place prior to a disruption based on an organisation’s risk appetite and potential threats, to safeguard operations and brand reputation. BCM should be considered as a continuous cycle of measuring crisis capabilities across an organisation, defining gaps, and developing an executable programme of improvement.
Why business continuity?
All organisations – local or global and public or private – are vulnerable to disruptions. This has been clearly reinforced by current events, in which organisations are having to accommodate the new norms of pandemic operations. The impacts being felt on revenues, growth plans, strategy, brand and employer relations is something we all have to deal with.
Speak with an expert
Book a free consultation with a 4C expert to discover how we can help build your business continuity capability and organisational resilience.
As major disruptive events increase, you need to consider how your organisation would react to:
If the threat of these is present in your organisation you should have a Business Continuity Plan, BCP, in place to manage them.
High risk and heavily regulated sectors
4C Strategies helps organisations build, verify and track their business continuity capability. We work in the most high risk and heavily regulated sectors of society, to maintain mission-critical activities and recover effectively during a disruption. Our services are delivered in accordance with the ISO 22301 standard. We also prepare clients for ISO certification, which we did for Cytiva (formerly GE Healthcare Life Sciences) at seven of their production facilities.
Business Continuity Management Maturity Model
We have a wealth of experience from helping organisations within the public and private sectors to increase their BCM capabilities. Our clients range from local municipalities to global enterprises to international organisations such as the EU.
We utilise a proven BCM maturity model which enables us to analyse how well the people, plans and business processes of an organisation can reliably and sustainably follow and deliver on BC plans. These findings are gathered through exercises and workshops that promote inter-organisational collaboration, bringing together crisis management teams as well as people from business functions that are often faced with taking key decisions, should disruptions to operations occur.
During the workshops we cover everything from dependencies, risks, disaster recovery planning and recovery time objectives to potential threats, such as cyber-attacks, data loss and recovery point objectives. We also ensure the basics are in place and up to date, such as ensuring relevant contact information is shared to facilitate a rapid response.
Discover how we helped Openreach to increase their Business Continuity and Incident Management capabilities.
Business Continuity and Resilience Services
Exonaut® Business Continuity Software
4C’s BCM services are complemented by Exonaut® Business Continuity Manager, our web-based and mobile solution to digitalise, test and invoke business continuity plans. Exonaut BCM forms part of the Exonaut readiness management platform, with fully integrated solutions for risk management, business continuity, compliance management and training and exercises.
Where possible, we utilise the cloud-based solution during assignments to ensure projects run efficiently, assure transparency, make data backups, while providing clients with secure access to findings once the assignment is completed. During workshops and exercises, we can enter data directly into the system and the smart algorithms will generate automated graphs and statistics based on the response of attendees. This information proves invaluable for teams to get a better insight into their existing capabilities as well as highlighting clear goals for departmental and organisation-wide improvements.
4C software developers and implementation teams work closely with our management consultants to ensure that Exonaut is continually evolving based on our project needs, client feedback, and industry best practices.
Integrated services
As a global provider of organisational resilience services and software, we offer a fully integrated offering of risk management, business continuity management and incident & crisis management. By combining the three pillars of resilience, organisations become better prepared and more resilient through a continuous cycle of capability development based on existing risk appetite. This combined risk-centric and resilience maturity approach, has delivered game-changing results for many of our clients.
BCM and COVID-19
The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for having an effective BC plan in place. The move to remote working has changed the business landscape and with it, the demands on cyber security and IT continuity. Business as usual is now conducted under a new norm that puts stress on all areas of operations.
The repercussions of the pandemic will be felt long into the future. What will a return to normality mean for your organisation? How can you review your response and apply lessons learned, to ensure you are in the best position possible to counter the next incident or crisis?
Having helped many organisations during the pandemic, we can support you on the journey to the new normal, by assessing the risks to your business moving forward and identifying the best integrated approach to take for your customers, employees, providers or constituents.