Business continuity management is a holistic approach with the aim of ensuring the continue existence of a company and its business processes in crisis situations. As part of business continuity management, possible risks are identifie, their effects are examine and measures are describe to maintain operations in the event of a crisis or to ensure a quick and smooth restart after a failure.
The German term for Business Continuity Management, abbreviate to BCM, is operational continuity management. Risks of business interruptions and the resulting financial damage or existential threats to the company should be minimize. Business Continuity Management identifies possible risks and their effects on business processes. The key questions of Business Continuity Management are: Which business processes are important and must be maintaine in the event of a crisis?
What measures are necessary to ensure this?
Base on the answers to these questions, BCM describes concepts, measures, priorities and responsibilities for continuing operations in the event of a crisis situation or for resuming operations quickly and smoothly after a failure. BCM is the responsibility of the management level. The establishment and implementation Portugal Phone Number List of business continuity management is delegate to the relevant units or departments. As a rule, all levels and areas of a company are include in BCM.
Numerous norms and standards deal with operational continuity and emergency management. One internationally recognize standard is ISO 22301. In Germany, the BSI (Federal Office for Information Security) has publishe the BSI 100-4 standard. It describes a systematic approach to setting up and implementing emergency management in authorities or companies.
Business Continuity Management from an IT Perspective
Business continuity management is a holistic approach that originates from business administration. However, business continuity management is often viewed from an IT perspective. From this perspective. BCM takes care of securing and maintaining business-critical IT processes, including the underlying hardware and software. Risks of operational interruptions to company IT and possible consequential damage are minimize. On the one hand, BCM ensures that IT operations can continue under crisis conditions, and on the other hand, BCM enables IT processes to be restarte quickly and without errors after a hardware or software failure. Scenarios that pose a risk to company IT and IT processes or trigger a crisis include:
Power failure, water damage or natural disasters that endanger or impair the functioning of IT systems
Loss of staff due to termination, illness or pandemics
Failure of partners. Service providers or other service providers
Each scenario requires a specific approach with cell phone number listing individual measures. Backup concepts and redundancies are often used to ensure the continu operation of critical IT systems in the event of a crisis.
The various components and process phases of Business Continuity Management
Business continuity management is made up of several individual components and different process phases. It is a continuous process cycle that must be repeat over and over again. The details of business continuity management vary depending on the industry, company or business processes. The following components and phases are usually include.
Continuous optimization of business continuity management
The task of risk analysis is to find potential dangers for interruptions to business processes. The results can be use to derive initial measures to proactively reduce risks in advance. The criticality of the business processes is assess as part of the business impact analysis. Base on these assessments, it can be determine which processes need to be protect from the identifi risks and to what extent. Depending on the criticality, the business impact analysis defines the maximum tolerable downtime.
The business continuity plan describes measures to maintain business processes. Minimize downtime and restart after failures. A business continuity plan consists of several individual Bulk Database plans such as disaster and business recovery plans, crisis management plans. Emergency plans, emergency operations plans, alarm plans, escalation plans and the definition of an emergency response team. The measures in individual plans can in turn be assign to different individual phases of a crisis. The return of emergency operations to normal operations and the follow-up of an incident. The structures, reporting channels. Responsibilities and roles defined in the plans allow for rapid response in crisis situations and the control of the measures describ.
