‘Business Continuity Manager’ software enters the market

LockPath, a provider of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) applications, has announced the launch of ‘Business Continuity Manager’.

The tool, part of Keylight 2.4, the latest version of the company’s GRC platform, enables organizations to manage business continuity in a simple and effective way, empowering them to create unified business continuity strategies.

Leveraging the flexibility of the Keylight platform, Business Continuity Manager lets businesses create custom business continuity plans, manage the associated risks and minimize potential losses.

Unlike traditional GRC tools, Business Continuity Manager provides common forms for business continuity right out of the box and lets customers use any standard web browser to quickly match Keylight to the company’s distinct business continuity processes and needs.

Key features of Business Continuity Manager include:

• Business impact analysis: Through detailed analysis, users can easily organize complex information, determine the impacts of a loss, and prioritize the recovery function of multiple business components.
• Business continuity plans: Users can leverage pre-built forms, workflows and notifications to quickly build a business continuity plan or create a fully customized plan down to individual fields, field types, field visibility and forms.
• Teams and contacts: The tool enables the appointment of a team leader, identification of a team of essential personnel, and definition of critical vendors so if a disaster occurs, users can immediately locate them and make contact.
• Tabletop exercises: To ensure a plan will be effective, Business Continuity Manager supports exercises to test a plan against a simulated situation and collect valuable information about its application.
• Assessments: Users can launch business continuity plan assessments or tabletop exercises and create reports to gather valuable insight about the plan and its execution.
• Workflow: Custom workflows allow a simplified review of plans and exercises by appropriate experts across the organization. Users can create a custom set of stages that the document will be routed through based on certain criteria.
• Document management: Users can easily export business continuity plan content with all supporting documents (Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Visio files) into one comprehensive Adobe PDF document.
• Extensibility: Users can add lookup references to policies, controls and resources in other Keylight application records to enhance their organization’s ability to proactively prepare for and react to events.

Risk and Business Continuity - Managing for the unknown

Do you have the right team in place to face a future filled with Unknown Risks?

While the perilous unknown may be the stuff of sci-fi and doomsday movies, the potential for more mundane or fiscal danger is always around us.

This should not provoke paranoia but rather a healthy sense of vigilance as well as skepticism. Executives need to be vigilant about what could happen next. By all means consider pandemics, earthquakes and wars, but also be skeptical about their effects on their organisations.

For example, if financial executives had been more vigilant and skeptical prior to the fiscal meltdown of 2008 some businesses may not have found their institutions so over-leveraged.

Clearly, we say this from the moral high ground of Hindsight, which is always 20/20.

So what is a savvy executive to do? Three questions come to mind.

What is the worst that could happen to us?
This question prompts many scenarios from a natural disaster to a market crash, or even the entry of a significant new competitor who changes the balance in the market place. What happens then? Executives need to keep their antennae up and do their Risk Assessments and sound Business Continuity Planning.

How would we react?
Very often companies do have BC or disaster plans but are they robust and up to date? Do they stipulate what happens when resources are not available or executives and employees are separated from each other?

Do we have the right people in place to recover?
This is perhaps the most important question. Very often members of a leadership team are equipped to manage when the going is good, but what happens when the bad gets into fear and panic?

The senior leader must ask if these people have the right mindset to adapt to evolving and changing circumstances.

Flexibility becomes an imperative, but so too does resilience. You need leaders who can cope with setback and maintain the discipline to persevere.

Big questions provoke big picture thinking. Very often such questions will cause real unease, or at least a sense of disruption and that is healthy.

If a catastrophe strikes disruption will be significant. So what will you do to survive?