Six Steps to Ensuring Business Continuity

Today’s critical events are dynamic. We cannot guarantee when one event converges with another and makes the situation more critical to handle. The ongoing pandemic displays the cruelty of synchronicity which impacted smooth recovery efforts for situations like the Australian bushfire or catastrophic flooding in Sally.

We can have more such events in the future, but what matters is how we prepare our plans to save our people and ensure business continuity. In addition, emergency response teams or risk or security professionals today lack the technical sophistication and even expertise needed to mitigate the negative impacts of critical events.

Here we love to discuss how the Critical Event Management platform can provide a holistic approach to the recovery process by providing unified communication and risk intelligence capabilities. 

Traditional methods fail your risk management

Most organizations are still engrossed with traditional or disjointed tools and practice manual processes. Therefore, they have little to no expertise to react and avoid critical events efficiently and effectively. Keeping track of their people or monitoring supply chain operations becomes too tough. Not being able to understand the current state of the event, their resolution process is slow, exacerbating the situation even more.  As a result, your business operation may take a hit that threatens your profitability as well as brand reputation.

To avoid the potential threats to business continuity, your organization can build a better recovery plan using Zsuite CEM or Critical Event Management platform.

1. Build an effective plan

Every business has an emergency plan in place. If you have one, do you ever realize it provides appropriate risk management based on incident types? If not, you must create your emergency plan given the types of critical events or threats.

  • Segment your plan by event type and determine its scope.
  • Decide your step or incident responder.

2. Ensure collaborative approach

In order to handle major incidents, it is critical to collaborate with response teams, chief information officer, chief security officer to maximize their expertise and important resources to speed up response and prevent critical events that ensure business continuity.

3. Validate critical information

Risk assessment is the key to understanding the type of critical events based on the information you receive. However, more often these sources of information may not be accurate and prevent you from getting visibility into the threats. The best approach is to assess various assets at risk and derive contextual information. This means you could have better resources to determine risk.

4. Visualize risks

Visualizing risk factors gives you the opportunity to build a common operating picture, which enables your team to view the information from the same source and develop an idea about the situation. Based on the risk evaluation, you can determine how many of your people are in harm’s way, detect impacted supply routes, and affected building areas. Visualization ensures that you always apply the best practice-

  • Location intelligence can be the right tool to identify people- stakeholders, partners, and employees at risk.
  • Contextual awareness makes it easier to reach the right incident responder who can prevent consequences.

5. Automate workflows

An effective crisis communication depends on the scalability of automated workflows. As we integrate consistent and efficient workflows into our CEM, we can communicate more effectively without arising any confusion while accelerating the response process. Our automated workflows can include notices for-

  • Response team callouts
  • Conference room activation
  • Employee accountability checks

6. Improve your action

After you mitigate risks, it is imperative that you assess your performance and analyze how you dealt with the situation or where it lacked. By combining all assets, you can centralize and visualize data that helps your team come to a conclusion and build a more effective response plan for future incidents.

Businesses need to protect their assets – their people and property in order to ensure business continuity. Leveraging the right CEM tool like Zsuite helps you visualize risks and build an efficient business continuity plan.