If business professionals ignore network and system issues, the consequences could be dire. For instance, imagine what might happen if your company suffers a cyberattack, flood or supply chain failure. In this scenario, your critical networks and systems may slow down or stop working. And if you lack an effective business continuity management (BCM) strategy, you risk downtime and outages that could put a significant dent in your business’ bottom line.
Don’t let downtime and outages get the best of you. Instead, your company can craft a BCM strategy that ensures you can minimize the risk of business disruptions.
Now, let’s take a look at five things that every business professional needs to know about BCM.
- Poor BCM can cause long-lasting harm to a company, its employees and its customers.
Although BCM is a top priority for many companies, business professionals often fail to allocate the necessary time and resources to deploy effective BCM strategies. As such, these business professionals may miss out on opportunities to help their respective companies succeed.
For example, if a business lacks the skills and knowledgebase to address a network or system outage, this company may struggle to identify the root cause of downtime. The company’s employees may work feverishly to find out why an outage has occurred. Yet without a clear-cut strategy to address an outage, these employees may struggle to limit downtime.
There is a direct correlation between the amount of time associated with a network or system outage and the impact of downtime on a company’s brand reputation and bottom line. Fortunately, if business professionals understand the importance of BCM, they can take the necessary steps to resolve outages and downtime faster than ever before.
- There is no one-size-fits-all solution to BCM problems.
Much in the same way that no two companies are exactly alike, the BCM strategy that works well for one business may not work well for another. Thus, business professionals are responsible for learning BCM best practices and using these practices to develop the ideal BCM strategies for their respective companies.
Some of the best practices to incorporate into a BCM strategy include:
Understand the threats that your company faces. By performing a threat analysis and establishing threat priorities, business professionals can determine the best course of action to identify and mitigate assorted dangers.
Assess problem areas. If your company previously suffered data breaches or other network or system problems that resulted in outages and downtime, you can incorporate insights from these past experiences into your BCM strategy. That way, you can address BCM problem areas across your company.
Communicate your strategy. Teach employees about a BCM strategy and respond to their concerns and questions about it. Oftentimes, it is beneficial to reach out to employees for BCM strategy feedback as well.
Perform regular testing. A BCM strategy is not a one-time plan. Conversely, business professionals must test, analyze and update this plan regularly to ensure optimal results.
Use the right systems. With the right incident management and alert escalation software, business professionals are better equipped than ever before to keep track of myriad threats and quickly address such problems.
When it comes to BCM, there is no need to take shortcuts. If you learn BCM best practices and incorporate them into your company’s everyday operations, you may be able to stop threats before they lead to outages and downtime.
- Having the right BCM team in place can make a world of difference.
Developing an effective BCM strategy is no easy task, particularly for a company with limited time and resources at its disposal. Luckily, if a company teaches employees about BCM and implements standardized processes and protocols, it can empower its workers to take action against a wide range of dangers.
For instance, a company that develops an effective BCM strategy may want to incorporate BCM training programs. Because if a business educates its employees about BCM, these workers will know exactly what to do any time a potential danger arises.
Let’s not forget about the importance of building a dedicated BCM team, either. This team should include business professionals who possess comprehensive BCM training and expertise, and as a result, can help a company avoid outages and downtime at all costs. This team also should leverage state-of-the-art incident management and alert escalation software that fosters real-time communication and collaboration. By doing so, BCM team members can work together to ensure full resolution of any incident, at any time.
- A BCM strategy may prove to be a cost- and time-saver.
The cost of a single network or system outage may total hundreds or thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, the time associated with repairing this issue can add up, especially if a problem causes a company to become non-operational.
On the other hand, the cost and time savings associated with an effective BCM strategy can be substantial. In addition to eliminating the risk of outages and downtime, this strategy can help business professionals maximize their productivity and efficiency. As a result, a BCM strategy could prove to be a key differentiator for a company, regardless of a business’ size, stature or industry.
- BCM continues to evolve.
BCM is a constantly moving target. As network and system threats continue to evolve, business professionals will need to adapt their BCM strategies accordingly. Otherwise, business professionals risk costly, time-intensive downtime and outages due to BCM strategies that fail to address advanced threats.
If you’re struggling to get started on the development and implementation of an effective BCM strategy, there is no need to worry. In fact, if you start small, you can take a bottom-up approach to BCM – something that may help your company thrive.
The deployment of incident management and alert escalation software may be a great starting point toward the launch of an effective BCM strategy. This software empowers business professionals to track and monitor incidents of all sizes. It even provides analytics and reporting features to help business professionals learn about incidents and determine the best ways to put outages and downtime in the past.
Remember, the longer that you wait to deploy incident management and alert escalation software, the more likely it becomes that your business could suffer the consequences associated with outages and downtime. Start using incident management and alert escalation software today, and you can take the first step to create and launch an effective BCM strategy.
