BCM Strategy and Plan Development

With Continuity Vault™, organizations can prepare and maintain efficient and effective functional recovery strategies and plans.

Plans define how issues resulting from incident should be addressed and managed. Build workflow based recovery plans using Continuity Vault™. Assign primary and alternate owners for each step and build escalation if the primary and alternate owners are not available to respond. Allocate the timelines for each step ensuing the aggregate time taken falls with the RTO through Continuity Vault™.

CV helps in efficiently and effectively building and maintaining functional recovery plans without the need of repeated trainings. This significantly reduces the implementation time (duration) of the organization’s BCM program, hence reducing the actual risk of not having a plan or not having an effective plan in the event of a disruption.

• Workflow based recovery plans
• Assign primary and alternate ownersfor each step of the plan with n number of escalations
• Allocate the timelines for each step ensuing the aggregate time taken falls with the RTO
• Objective score for each of the strategies based on which you can select the most appropriate strategy to implement, making it easy to convince the top management on cost benefits.
• Track implementation of the recovery strategy / ies

Exercising

A planned exercise programme is required to ensure that all the aspects of the response to an incident have been tested. Continuity Vault™ helps in establishing the programme, implementing, and tracking the same. At a click of a button you can invoke the drill or invoke a plan for live incident, send notifications to the stakeholders, receive updates from the team on the ground, and on real-time basis monitor the status of every step of the recovery plan drill from the command centre.

Continuity Vault™ encompasses an end-to-end BC exercising capability; with the ability for administrators to issue exercises to user departments and monitor their completion of - planning the drill, scheduling it with a detailed agenda, and analyzing the findings. This allows a consistent approach to exercising which can be developed to cover desk checks, walkthroughs, simulations, technical recovery, etc.

Most importantly, exercisers and reviewers create corrective-actions/ improvement tasks, so that the people, the plans, and the business itself is continuously learning.

Emergency Notification

Success of any BC planning process relies on the effectiveness of dealing with incidents and the timely recovery of operations. Key to this are two aspects:

• Emergency Notification
• Incident Management

Emergency notification –Continuity Vault™ performs notification through multiple channels containing a wide-range of options for effective communication at the time of need such as:

• Email
• SMS
• Mobile app

We do not rely upon third-party tools for sending notifications though we can integrate Continuity Vault™ with client defined third-party tools.

Continuity Vault™ is integrated with the client SMS and SMTP gateway ensuring that the existing feature is utilized, and also saves client the additional costs - of Capex for purchasing add-on notification tool and to keep that tool; and Opex for maintaining the licenses for notification.

Incident Management

At the heart of each plan are the various sets of activity steps; simple checkl ists of what needs to be done, in what timeframes, by whom and escalation if the primary member is not available. These checklists can be invoked in real-time, so that crisis team members can collaborate on resolving the incident.

Recovery activities, decision points and communications lists can be accessed by multiple devices - mobile, tablets, laptops and desktops.

The dynamic aspect of this module means that there is also a flexibility for the recovery teams to create, allocate and share new activities/ actions (over and above those contained in plans) in response to the requirements of individual events.

Individual team members have instant, real-time access to event information both for the entire teams and also their personal action lists. They can communicate with each other and view progress towards recovery goals.

Furthermore, the unique virtual white-board facility enables 'command centre' messages to be communicated instantly. Fundamentally, the sharing of robust, accurate information lies at the heart of effective incident management.

From an administration perspective, central dashboards allow administrators to monitor the overall progress against plan and to group plan activity together where there is a wide-scale incident.

• Fully automated recovery plan execution
• At a single-click, send notification over Email or SMS to all stakeholders (using inbuilt notification module)
• Receive status updates from operational team on the ground
• Real-time monitoring of status of every step of the recovery plan drill
• Provides incident trend-analysis
• Displays detailed and step-by-step view/ report of the incidents
• Perform call tree verifications

What-If Analysis

Every business has this question, "If an incident occurs, what would be the impact and what are the recovery options which can be invoked?” Continuity Vault's most important feature is that it provides a real-time view of impact of an incident on the organization, not only from financial perspective but also in the form of - work (transactions) completed as well impacted, number of resources impacted, facilities impacted, dependencies if any etc.

Not just this, Continuity Vault™ will prompt you with options that can used to invoke and reduce the impact. This feature will let the team know the number of resources required to manage business continuity, where the resource can be moved to, how much time is required to manage the backlog, etc. And as the options are invoked, it will show how or to what extent the impact is reducing. Besides, this feature can be used to simulate the incident in stress-free environment so you know the impact and what options are available if an incident occurs.

Audit (Internal and External)

As per the ISO 22301 standard, organization needs to conduct evaluations of its business continuity procedures and capabilities in order to ensure their continuing suitability, adequacy and effectiveness. For any organization to identify this, the organization first needs to identify the performance of BCM against a set benchmark. This module of Continuity Vault enables users to perform an evaluation against the calendar activities as well as any unplanned event.

• Conduct and manage internal or external audits using Continuity Vault™.
• Circulate observation and NCs, identify owner, corrective and preventive actions.
• Track/ monitor these actions to closure.
• Set reminder for due date of the closure of actions and escalate if the actions are not closed within the timelines

Reports

For administrators and BC professionals, the reporting process brings together all the hard work that they have undertaken to build a BC structure in an organization that has accurate, up-to-date and usable plans. Where are my gaps? Is all happening according to internal SLAs? Where are my potential points of failure? How do I track dependency across a complex organization? How can I be sure that everything is in place and supports the end user? Should a plan needs to be invoked? How can I certify to the board that we have effective governance in place according to internal and/ or external standards and provide evidence, if required?

All of the above questions (and more) can be answered using Continuity Vault’s flexible reporting processes. We also enable custom reporting which means that clients can quickly and easily extract reports in their own formats for further manipulation enabling BCM Managers to say 'I know' instead of 'I think'..

BCM Calendar

BCM Calendar in Continuity Vault™ gives complete visibility of the upcoming events, activities, action items, reviews, meetings, drills etc. Not just these it would send the action owner reminders to perform the activity and escalate to multiple levels (as defined) if the action is not performed.

Program and Policy Management

Continuity Vault™ provides BC Management with an immediate view of the completeness of the program, and the correctness of all of its components. A simple dashboard provides an overall view and allows drill-down to identify delinquent elements. A powerful workflow engine allows the client to configure how and when alerts will be sent to the users to engage them in the resiliency effort.

Complex corporate hierarchies can be mirrored, and integration to external data sources are automated. Continuity Vault’s template approach allows the client to configure different questionnaires for different purposes; perhaps building complex process recovery plans for some departments, and simple emergency drills for others. This allows even the most complex businesses to accommodate divergent needs in a single tool..