Beyond the first 48 hours: Can your business continuity plan go the distance?

January 2013
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Beyond the first 48 hours: Can your business continuity plan go the distance?

At a glance

While many companies have good crisis management plans that will get them through the initial impacts of a major event, companies should implement a comprehensive business continuity management program to take them beyond the first 48 hours of a crisis or disaster.

Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, the 2011 Japanese tsunami and nuclear disaster, 2010’s Pakistani floods, and the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano are signals that disruptive climate and geological events are increasing in frequency. These disasters exposed gaps and weaknesses in many businesses’ crisis management plans.

Beyond the first 48 hours addresses the fact that while many companies have good crisis management plans that will get them through the initial impacts of a major event, there is a need for today’s complex organizations to implement a comprehensive business continuity management program to take them beyond the first 48 hours - all the way through a crisis and its aftermath to the restoration of operations and the preservation of the company's brand. This paper explores the elements and benefits of an effective business continuity management program which:

  • Encompasses emergency response, crisis management, IT disaster recovery, and business continuity.
  • Focuses on the recovery of critical business processes, prioritized according to their importance to the organization’s overall functionality.
  • Employs a standards-based approach to assure uniform and consistent planning, implementation, and upgrading of business continuity policies and procedures across the organization.
  • Uses specialists who’ve created and assessed hundreds of business continuity programs and can provide out-of-the-box solutions across the planning process, from analysis to reporting.