Business Continuity Planning and Trends

MissionMode partners with business continuity managers across industries to better understand continuity statistics by providing the tools they need to quickly and easily communicate critical information, share timely information and photos from impacted locations, and implement incident management procedures to enable speedy issue resolution.

Business Continuity Awareness Week 2017 Addresses Cyber Security

Business Continuity Awareness Week

In light of the very recent WannaCry ransomware cyber attack that has impacted more than 230,000 victims in over 150 countries since it began last week, it is more important now than ever to be thinking about your organization’s business resiliency, specifically your business continuity plan and IT disaster recovery plan. Should your organization experience any type of business disruption—such as a cyberattack—the best defense is having not only a plan, but also a crisis communications platform that will aid in the management of such an event. Business Continuity Awareness...
Read More

Testing Your Business Continuity Plan

readiness best practice - workshop

If the employees in your organization are spending the time, energy, and resources to develop your business continuity plan, your organization must be ready for any disruption, right? Possibly, but making this assumption isn’t going to help anyone during an emergency if the plan is not spot on! If you document your plan, but don’t share it with your team or train on it, it’s like not having a plan at all. RUNNING DRILLS & EXERCISES Even more critical to your business continuity program’s success is to run your BC...
Read More

Build a Business Continuity Team with Decision Authority

Although most organizations have contemplated – to some degree – the what and how of business continuity plans, including discussions about the stability of the IT system and what to do if the company’s facilities or IT infrastructure are compromised, the who is often overlooked. Assigning business continuity roles and responsibilities to each of your team members and documenting that information in your plan will ensure that all the details are handled in a timely and consistent manner. If your organization has no business continuity plan in place, it’s fine...
Read More

Using Social Media in Business Continuity

crisis communications

Social media can be a powerful tool in a business continuity management program arsenal, however, according to a PwC survey of business continuity managers, 57% of respondents are not systematically leveraging social media in their programs, and only 8% believe that social media has helped their organization better identify and respond to crisis events. Social Media for Business Continuity Management There are many ways business continuity managers can leverage social media in a crisis, but to be effective requires forethought and training. A 2014 survey on Social Media in the Workplace revealed that...
Read More

Emergency Field Communications

crisis field communications

When emergencies arise, one of the most difficult aspects of crisis management is accessing the most accurate and timely information available to drive effective response planning and decision making. Whether the incident is happening across campus or across the globe, it’s unlikely that all of the people needed to determine next steps are on-site with a first-hand view of the situation. Real-time, interactive emergency field communications are a key success driver. Emergency Field Communications: Challenges MissionMode supports hundreds of organizations across a wide variety of industries many of which encounter frequent field-based situations that...
Read More

Fulfilling Employee Safety Responsibilities

employee safety

Business continuity teams need to be prepared to address many different types of business disruptions. Some, like product recalls or data breaches can have very widespread impact, but do not usually involve employee safety. With incidents such as severe weather, natural disasters, fire or physical violence, however, organizations have serious employee safety responsibilities. Duty of Care Obligation Happily, most organizations take their responsibility for ensuring employee safety very seriously. Legally, directors and officers of a corporation are required to meet the Duty of Care in the decisions they make as...
Read More

Reputation Crisis Management

reputation risk management

The focus of most business continuity plans is operational resiliency – how to keep operations running smoothly in the event of an unforeseen crisis. But some crises don’t involve disruptions to service delivery. When a reputation-based crisis occurs, the reputation crisis management steps for restoring marketplace trust are vastly different than those required for physical disruptions and/or power/IT failure. Warren Buffet was quoted as saying “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” Reputation-based crises can be triggered by...
Read More

Risk Assessment For Business Continuity

risk assessment

In creating business continuity plans, every organization completes a series of risk assessment exercises. Without this general risk assessment, it would be impossible to prioritize what business continuity management (BCM) plans are needed. Each time a specific threat arises, business continuity teams need a risk assessment process to determine if the event merits activation of BCM teams and plans. Monitoring Early Warning Signs The key to effective event-specific risk assessment is to have some early warning detection in place. To best manage unplanned incidents, it helps to have visibility into the potential...
Read More

The Importance of Business Continuity Management Drills

business continuity management drills

It’s a fact; business continuity management programs (BCM) that consistently perform well-planned exercises get better results when dealing with real crisis situations. After all, you never know when a disruption will take place, so ensuring you run business continuity management drills can greatly improve your team’s ability to adequately respond when they need to. Business Continuity Management Drills: Practice Makes Perfect Running business continuity management drills is a key role for any business continuity program leader. Drafting BCM plans and making sure they work effectively in a crisis are two wildly...
Read More

Creating Business Continuity Plans

Creating Business Continuity Plans

While globally, the level of maturity of business continuity programs continues to rise, there are still many organizations that do not feel fully prepared. And, there is confusion when it comes to creating business continuity plans. On average, respondents to MissionMode’s Readiness survey rate themselves at 58/100 in overall preparedness, and a recent disaster preparedness benchmark survey found that 75% of companies worldwide are failing in terms of IT disaster readiness. According to our Readiness Survey, 60% of organizations have underdeveloped plans as follows: 6.9% currently have no business continuity...
Read More