Global business, national and international financial challenges, ever-increasing competition, industry consolidation and the constant chase for improved profitability raise the bar for today’s continuity programs by generating new requirements for much higher levels of availability, recoverability and operability. They also raise the bar for the nature and scope of covered incidents.
Today, most experts agree that any new approach must support one critical objective—integrating systems availability, business continuity, disaster recovery and incident management processes into a seamless program that protects the organization from all business incidents on a daily basis, not just during a traditional “disaster” event. We refer to this kind of optimal, highly leveraged program as All-Risk Incident Management™ and believe it is the natural next step in the maturity of the disaster recovery/business continuity industry…and in the maturity of an organization’s ability to truly insulate themselves and conduct business in the face of nearly any adverse event.
An All-Risk Incident Management Plan serves as the “umbrella” for all senior management incident responses. This plan will guide responses to events not addressed by the disaster recovery or business continuity plans and which require a different type of response. For example, crisis communications, management succession, supply chain continuity, manufacturing continuity, life safety, virus response, labor relations, product liability, crisis management and a dozen others. The IM Plan enables a highly responsive, enterprise-wide ability for senior management to respond to any incident of any type with a coordinated, cohesive response across business units, across locations and across the globe—while at the same time knowing that the subject matter experts with their “feet on the street” are focused on the specific topic of their plan.
It’s the best of both worlds.