The Business Continuity Management Process

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a process designed to equip a company with the ability to respond to IT systems failure. Although it’s primarily designed for the recovery of IT services and functions, it shouldn’t be solely about that. In essence, BCM also entails implementing an organization-wide discipline. Once a BCM strategy is in place, it should be considered as the beginning of an ongoing commitment: Organizations evolve, and disaster recovery strategies like BCM need to evolve with them.

An efficient BCM process mainly consists of four stages, namely: Initiation, Requirements and Strategy, Implementation and Operational Management.

Initiation

The initiation stage is when factors like budget, sponsorship, identification of appropriate resources, and selection of the data center provider are discussed.

Requirements and Strategy

This stage is critical to BCM implementation because it’s when the organization determines how well it can survive a disaster or any other type of business interruption. It can then accurately determine the financial damage it may sustain. BCM requirements can then be identified after risk-assessment activities and business impact analysis are performed.

Implementation

The BCM implementation stage includes four sub-stages, namely: Identification of the roles and responsibilities of all personnel involved, Provision of risk-reduction resources, Purchase of recovery facilities, and Testing.

Operations management

The final step in BCM is to ensure everything is monitored and maintained in a constant state of readiness. This equips the business with the best possible means of recovery from a catastrophic incident.