EmerGeo's Practical Approach for Emergency Preparedness, Crisis Management & Disaster Recovery

Organizations of all sizes around the world are facing increasingly difficult and changing conditions that threaten their profitability and existence. Many factors contribute to these challenging conditions, including

• natural disasters, human-related disruptions, and technical failures
• threats of pandemic diseases such as influenza
• rapid regional and global expansion
• competitive pressures and increasingly high customer expectations
• stricter regulations and increasing requirements for accountability
• supply chain concerns such as "just-in-time" delivery
• market penetration opportunities in developing countries

The financial success of an organization, whether an enterprise or a government department, is affected by its ability to be resilient amid an ever changing environment filled with risks while endeavouring to gain a competitive advantage in and increase value to its shareholders.

A business resilience program enables a company to protect itself from anticipated and unexpected events while capitalizing on its opportunities. A business resilience program has three main objectives for dealing with both anticipated and unexpected events:

• protect critical operations, services, and resources to maintain business continuity
• develop resilient business strategies that exploit opportunities to gain competitive advantage
• overcome enterprise-wide risks and vulnerabilities to protect shareholder values

Evolution from disaster recovery to business continuity to business resilience planning
The fields of business resilience planning and disaster recovery planning have played critical roles in helping businesses achieve part, but not all, of the business resilience objective. The primary objective of disaster recovery planning has been limited to protecting IT infrastructure and services from unexpected events and disasters. Business continuity planning extends the boundaries of disaster recovery planning to the protection of business operations and processes. The objective of a business resilience program, however, is larger than both disaster recovery planning and business continuity planning. A business resilience program extends the boundaries of protection from beyond unexpected events and disasters to include any changes from normal business activities.

EmerGeo's business resilience program objective
The business resilience program objective empowers the organization with the ability to rapidly adjust and transform business in response to any change in order to prevent and mitigate hazards, capture opportunities, create competitive position, and improve shareholder value. The program enables organizations to become resilient by proactively adapting and adjusting to any changes resulting from either unexpected events, such as disasters, or normal business demands and activities such as mergers, downsizing, or market changes.

Business resilience program requirements
The requirements are expressed in terms of capabilities and characteristics that allow a business resilience program to achieve its resilience objectives. The business resilience program has 5 high-level requirements. The program needs to be comprehensive, methodical, adaptable, proactive, and reactive.

• Comprehensive – This characteristic requires that a business resilience program be based on a comprehensive scope that covers an organization's end-to-end business and operational aspects. The scope includes business resilience strategies, business processes, people, IT assets and resources, non-IT assets and resources, products and services, supply-chains, laws and regulations, etc.
• Methodical – This ensures that a business resilience program is built on a structured, systematic and analytical approach for achieving resiliency objectives.
• Adaptable – This characterizes the ability of a business resilience program to adapt quickly to changing threats, circumstances, and business demands.
• Proactive – This is the ability of the business resilience program to anticipate future business changes, impacts, and discontinuities, and take pre-emptive actions to protect the resilience goals. The proactive business resilience program also allows you to take advantage of opportunities to increase shareholder value.
• Reactive – A business resilience program needs to have a strong reactive capability in addition to the proactive capability to defend or protect the organization from unexpected situations that can lead to disastrous consequences.

Bottom line, whether you are a large, medium or small enterprise or in any level of government, the ability to respond swiftly and effectively to a major incident has never been more important.

So how resilient is your business or department? If you're not sure, now is the time to start building business resilience into your organization, and EmerGeo Solutions can show you how.