Business Continuity
Many companies choose to build and manage their business continuity programme in-house – perhaps hiring additional resource with expertise in resiliency to help design and execute a programme. For companies that lack the in-house expertise or are under pressure to implement a business continuity programme quickly there is now another option: Business Continuity as a Service (BCaaS), which provides access to the expertise required to design, build, execute and maintain an effective resiliency programme.
What Is BCaas?
BCaaS provides on demand access to the expertise you need to manage the many and varied, known and unknown, operational risks inherent in the day-to-day activities involved in delivering services and supporting customers.
At NWT, we work with a variety of companies from SMEs to truly global enterprises, to design and maintain their business continuity programmes, using ISO 22301 as the industry standard for our service.
Why BCaas?
There are several reasons why our customers choose to use BCaaS instead of building and managing a continuity programme in-house:
Resourcing: Business continuity is a niche skill that isn’t readily available in the market. BCaaS gives you rapid access to experienced continuity experts that will deliver instant impact to your business.
Many of the companies we work with think of our team as embedded members of their teams – integrating our experts directly into their processes as we oversee their continuity programmes and provide coaching, mentoring and training roles, that leave behind a lasting legacy of capability.
Costs: The nature of business continuity is that you never know exactly when your programme will be called into action. A company must build an in-house team and create its business continuity programme years before a major disruption brings the team into action.
The staff costs and leadership investment required to create and maintain an in-house continuity programme are significant – more than some companies want to invest. BPaaS provides a flexible and scalable commerical model that allows you to call off our capabilities as and when they are needed.
It is a challenge to react and scale if the unthinkable occurs: When a disruption happens, companies often need to rapidly add members to their continuity team.
Since you can’t hire and onboard continuity experts in the critical moment, companies find themselves pulling staff with no experience in resiliency – then asking them to help in an emergency capacity as was seen particularly at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. As a result, NWT helped several customers manage the business continuity challenges, from connectivity to full roll outs of collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, to ensure that the business continued to deliver to their customers.
Why NWT?
How does our BCaaS work?
Step 1: Critical Friend Review of your business continuity programme or policy
The first step is to complete a comprehensive Critical Friend Review of your current programme, providing a full report to your business, which typically includes:
- Needs assessment
- Business and technical interviews
- Review of all documentation and artifacts
- Conversations with key employees and stakeholders
- Maturity model
- Observations about your programme
- Opportunities and recommendations for improvement.
For our BCaaS customers the evaluation includes a detailed plan of how we will oversee your continuity programme moving forward.
Governance, Policy, and Programme Support
Once we’ve started working with you, we’ll oversee the governance, policy and programme support for business continuity. Our team will:
- Manage and facilitate your governance processes and documentation for business continuity
- Review and update programme documentation
- Prepare all necessary updates for executive team members, board committees, the board of directors and any additional stakeholders involved in governance or oversight of the programme
- Conduct annual maturity assessments, including comparisons to previous years to show the growth of the programme over time.
Business Continuity Lifecycle
Our team manages all aspects of the business continuity lifecycle, including:
- Business impact analysis
- Business continuity planning
- Training and team development
- Documentation of business continuity exercises, such as tabletop exercises, as they are completed
- Assistance for audits or compliance efforts that involve the business continuity programme.
Vendor Resiliency
Vendors are a critical part of business continuity and resiliency. As part of our BCaaS offer, our senior commerical director and vendor management experts will work with your team and vendors to:
- Engage in exercises and plan reviews with business critical strategic vendors
- Identify vendors that warrant additional scrutiny and review
- Work with vendor management and other stakeholders to monitor the resilience of your vendors.
IT Disaster Recovery Strategy and Planning
Our customers IT teams play a critical role in continuity planning. In this area, we:
- Collaborate with the IT team to evaluate risk and create disaster recovery plans
- Provide business impact analysis data to the IT team to inform application and infrastructure tiers and recovery planning
- Highlight gaps between disaster recovery expectations of critical applications from business teams and actual recovery capabilities
- Participate and assist during disaster recovery exercises led by your IT team.
Communications and Awareness Strategy
As our customers trusted expert, we oversee the business, corporate and technical comms and awareness strategy within your company for the business continuity programme, which follows our standard indicative methodology.
- Quarterly awareness strategy, including posters, digital collateral and other communications
- Author and post articles through your internal communication channels to educate staff about what they can do to support the organisations goals.
Our communications and awareness approach will be customised to your organisation’s specific needs.
Programme Management
On a regular basis, our team will provide regular updates to key stakeholders using our Agile ways of working including:
- Regular status stand-ups, calls and governance meetings
- Briefings, updates, and presentations to internal stakeholders as needed
- Management of all logistics, including meetings, conference calls, and records management.
Features
- Business continuity procedures to support return to business as usual
- Support on a business continuity communications strategy
- Document procedures for responding to a business continuity incident
- Assignment of business continuity roles and responsibilities
- Disaster recovery and business continuity plans (BCP)
- Provides business impact analysis to identify recovery time objectives
- Provides impact analysis to identify maximum tolerable period of disruption
- Focussed or full organisational business continuity assessments available
- BCP production, including recovery of activities within a predetermined timeframe
- Business Continuity Procedures to support return to business as usual.
Benefits
- Ability to design methodology to best suit environment
- Quickly embedded cost reduction and efficiency improvements
- Soft landing delivery transition back to client
- Effective stakeholder community engagement
- Accurate understanding of project status
- Ability to operate in fully controlled project environments
- Improved business continuity process control and maturity
- Effective client team development via knowledge management
- Fully realised, quantifiable and reportable business continuity benefits
- Testing that cloud solutions function correctly prior to deployment.
- Extensive network of digital SME partners bringing further experience/capability.
For more information, please feel free to contact NWT’s Commercial Director Graeme Strain at Graeme.strain@newworldtech.io
