Our approach to business continuity management

Contingensee’s proven Business Continuity Management methodology encompasses the following elements:

Risk Mapping and understanding an organization's risk appetite

  • How much risk is the organization authorized and willing to take?
  • How much pain is the organization willing to endure?
  • Who gets to make the decisions?

Threat Risk Assessment (TRA), Risk Assessment (RA), Vulnerability Assessment (VA) or Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA)

  • Understand the threats and vulnerabilities that affect the organization.
  • Provides scope and perspective to planning activities.

Business Impact Analysis

  • Dependencies
  • Inputs
  • Actions
  • Outputs
  • Consumers
  • Cost of disruptions (pain)
  • RTOs, RPOs and ROLs

Mitigation and recovery strategy development

  • Resilience in design
  • Recovery strategies and steps
  • Technological strategies
  • Mitigation
  • Pre-positioning of resources
  • Contracts and SLAs for recovery and restoration services

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans

  • Write the plans so they are easy to follow, even with replacement employees.
  • Ensure the plans are accessible when they are needed, and by the people who need them.

Employee training

  • All personnel must know what is expected of them before, during and at the time of disruption.
  • They must know how, where and when to execute specific tasks.

Exercising

  • No plan is complete until it has been exercised and proven fit for purpose. 
  • "Successful" exercises find strategies that fail as well as those that work.

Refresh and update to ensure currency and applicability

  • The BCM program must participate in and be an integral part of the organization's change management process.
  • The interval of refresh should support the organization's risk appetite.
  • Some changes may be reflected in the plans immediately as they occur. Other changes will be captured as part of a regular refresh and update program.
  • Implement self-review and create a link to the organization's internal audit and review processes.