2010 saw major earthquakes strike Haiti, Chile,
China and Indonesia. It saw devastating floods in Pakistan and Australia. 2011
have brought out the opposite of resilience in people and organisation,
confronted by the most extreme challenges. With flood events in Lagos,
Australia, Brazil, the earthquakes in turkey, New Zealand, the tsunami in
Japan, civil unrests in London, Greece, Spain, Italy, and the Arab spring of
2011, which ousted regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and created fuelled
growing opposition to regimes in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and other middle eastern
states. These are very real recovery challenges that face organisations and
you. According to the Lloyd’s of
London’s risk index 2011, 2011 was the second most expensive year ever for the
insurance industry because of these incidents.
In addition,
while many of types of risk may be industry or regional specific, cyber risk is
universal. 2011 saw the hacking of state network from India to Brazil to
Nigeria. For businesses, the incident and frequency of data breaches have been
even more unrelenting; Nintendo, Honda, Toshiba, Playstation, Nokia, Google,
IMF, Wiki-leak and the Hong Kong stock exchange are victims of some form of
cyber crime or hacking. A global estimate of cyber crime is now costing
business around $114bn annually. Technical solutions are needed to evolve rapidly,
together with more efficient reporting of breaches to help quantify the risk
more accurately.
By reflecting
on disaster in terms of the need for strong, visible and distributes
leadership, differentiated response, recovery and effective communication,
organisations can achieve better outcomes with BCM, and reliably meet their
obligations to regulators, boards and stakeholders. Since the true measure of a
BCM plan is the success of it after an incident, organisations should apply the
good practice approach which provides a baseline and common language to help
BCM professionals to perform a rigorous Business Impact Analysis Assessment
(BIA). The BIA is the foundation on which the whole BCM is built. It can be
used to understand the impact of the failure to deliver a service or a product.
The BIA identifies business activities across the organisation, identifies
management owners of processes, identifies suitable staff, quantifies time
scale and collects data for the Continuity Requirements Analysis (CRA). The good
practice dictates that a BIA should be reviewed as a minimum annually but
frequently in the event of business change, change to internal and external business
process and significant change to risk and threats. Furthermore organisations
must focus on robust BCM frame works strategies, resource allocation supporting
continuity plans which objectively ‘fit for purpose’, practical and
periodically tested and rehearsed.
After the
unfolding events of the last two years, businesses need to give much greater
priority to BCM planning carefully for those risks they cannot prevent, as well
as being realistic about those they can. Organisations must determine its BCM
strategy by using information gathered from the BIA, CRA and risk and threat
assessment. Whatever strategy an organisation selects it has to ensure that it
meets the target time for resuming the delivery of its products and services
following its disruption. One strategy could be ‘balancing cost and speed of
recovery’. In this strategy, there is always a trade off between cost and speed
of recovery which needs to be balanced when selecting a strategy. So shorter
recovery time objectives = higher cost and vice versa. Another strategy worth
considering and is quite popular is ‘separation distance and the concept of “off
site” it’s basically replicating operations in a different location. It reduces
the likelihood of two sites being affected by the same incident except in cases
like pandemics and cyber attacks. Artco
Solutions will also recommend a centralised access to data, emergency
communications, emergency plans and key documents so senior management and
employee have what they need when they need it.
As we have
read, more than ever, businesses need effective BCM plans in place to protect their
plants, infrastructure, property, staff, and supply chains from the fall of
natural, political, social and economic threats.
For further assistance
please contact enquiry@artcosolutions.com
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