How to Manage a Business Continuity Vendor: Best Practices
If your business needs assistance in creating a BCDR strategy, it won’t be alone in hiring a business continuity vendor. The SEC’s National Examination Program (NEP) considers it good practice to use a third-party service provider to annually review your BCP and make recommendations.
Reliance on business continuity vendors continues to gain more traction in the industry. The goals to improve efficiency, stimulate growth, and enable operational transformation tip the scale in the decision-making process. Is your organization monitoring your critical vendors’ resiliency and recovery abilities? If not, are critical operations at risk of being hindered by a combination of unprepared vendors and insufficient internal resiliency and contingency planning?
Often, organizations take a siloed approach to their resiliency and recovery needs around business interruption risk. The more complex is the structure of the business, and the more it evolves (e.g., IT and supply chain management), the higher the number of internal and external processes and technology interdependencies required to reduce the operational and financial impacts associated with business interruptions.
Further, the entirety of a company’s resiliency and recoverability needs are often overlooked, with no structures or mechanisms to allow for integrated testing and verification. As a result, leadership has very little understanding of the organization’s real business interruption needs and capabilities.
Even when a vendor shares an overview of their BC plan, businesses struggle to understand how a vendor’s continuity program aligns with their own resiliency strategy. Only that organization that has developed and implemented its own BCM processes will have insight into the vendor’s recovery capabilities. An actual interruption event can demonstrate where your business is on a vendor’s priority list compared to other companies. Not getting proper attention and support will damage your market share, your brand, and reputation as if the disaster had directly affected your operations.
Evaluation Your Vendor’s Business Continuity Plan
To verify that all adequate regulations are in place, review the following six areas of your vendor’s BCP:
- Personnel loss and planning
- Relocation strategy
- Remote access availability
- Facility loss contingencies
- Crisis communication strategy
- Annual testing
- Addressing testing results demonstrating room for improvement
Business continuity plans should also detail your vendor’s business impact analysis (BIA) . Your organization needs to make sure a BIA is conducted annually or when any major changes or incidents occur.
Download our checklist to assess your suppliers, go through key questions to ask vendors, and more.
Four Drawbacks of a Vendor’s BCP
Here are 4 things to keep a close eye on in a vendor’s BCP:
- BCPs that solely cover IT disaster recovery . Some vendors do not distinguish between business continuity (e.g., people, processes, and facilities) and IT disaster recovery (e.g., information systems, data, and networks).
- BCPs that haven’t been reviewed or tested in the last 12 months . Any business is an evolving entity, so it a BCP and should closely reflect those changes.
- BCPs that don’t cover products/services that are pertinent to your relationship with the vendor. If your vendor developed various BCPs, make sure you only review a plan that applies to the services and products for which you’re paying.
- Unclear Definition of Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). If RTOs and RPOs do not meet your requirements, your business may need to take additional measures. Agreeing on a level of service and priority for your organization that you can expect after a business interruption will ensure you’re prepared to handle any disruption.
Note: An RTO is the time to recovery to an “established level of service” and doesn’t cover total recovery to full operation.
Additionally, the NEP recommends to consider the following points in reviewing a business continuity vendor:
- Keep an updated contact list of vendors and other important contacts . If the time comes crisis communication, or activate your business continuity plan, you’ll want to be sure your assigned client success team is there on standby.
- Prepare and test your processes as if you cannot rely on servers in your building, and consult with vendors on external servers in multiple geographic locations or in the cloud to ensure redundancy.
- When it comes to your vendor’s technology, review the IT infrastructure of your service providers to ensure they store your documents in a cloud-based system with multiple backup servers.
- As your vendor should be aware of your company’s business requirements for continuity of operations, they must be prepared to make relocation recommendations if you cannot access your building, whether it’s working from home, in another one of your firm’s offices, or even reserve rooms in advance at a local hotel.
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19 Best Practices to Manage Business Continuity with Critical Vendors
- Categories: Procurement Management , Vendor Lifecycle Management
Tom Rogers - CEO & Founder, CPA , CCMP
Planning for business continuity with critical vendors has been an area of focus for many third-party risk management professionals as of late. and rightly so. a trio of health, economic and geo-political events have created massive strains on supply chains and increasing concerns about cyber-attacks. and as companies shore up their own business continuity plans, they must consider the impact critical vendors have on those plans..
Ensuring business continuity with your critical vendors requires not only responding to (and potentially recovering from) a continuity event, but also ensuring you have the right plan, controls and oversight in place to ensure stability for the long haul.
Here are 19 best practices to manage business continuity with your critical vendors.
Response Activities
These are the immediate activities you undertake to assess risks with your vendors when a continuity event has occurred.
- Identify your critical vendors. These should have already been identified through your own business continuity planning.
- Review their contractual provisions to refresh your understanding of service level agreements, payment terms, potential legal risks and, in case needed, termination provisions.
- Send due diligence questionnaires (or conduct interviews) to understand how their business is being impacted by the event, and how near term (and mid-term) impacts to their company may impact your operations.
- For certain vendors you should dive deeper into their business continuity and disaster recovery plans – especially for those performing outsourced functions or supporting core systems and technologies. Understand whether their plan is comprehensive enough to ensure stability of your products/services, and whether they have implemented the plan.
- If the vendor has access to your systems or data, assess their approach to work from home and the security protocols they have implemented for data protection.
- Assess your own business continuity plans to ensure you have addressed how you will handle continuity in each operational area that you rely on critical vendors.
- Establish a communication plan with your internal vendor relationship managers, and key contacts at your vendors, to ensure consistent and open communication. Make sure you identify the who, what and how often.
Recovery Activities
Recovery includes all of the steps you need to take to address risks and/or operational problems with your vendors from the response phase. Consider the following activities when you identify a critical vendor that is under distress.
- Integrate secondary vendors into the operational activity to reduce the risk and increase the speed at which you can pivot if needed.
- Evaluate your ability to insource certain functions, at least for the short term, and establish plans when feasible.
- Consider on-site visits to get a first-hand look into the vendor’s operations.
- Enhance your continuous monitoring activities to track information about the vendor’s corporate health and/or cybersecurity practices.
- Modify contractual provisions to address exposure beyond your risk tolerance.
- In worst-case scenarios, terminate the agreement and transition to a new vendor.
Prevention Activities
Prevention focuses on taking steps to lessen the chance (in the future) that you will have continuity issues with your critical vendors, and ensuring you have the right mitigation strategies in place to lessen the impact when an incident does happen. Some of the important prevention activities include:
- Consolidate and eliminate risky vendors from your supply base.
- Build out alternative supplier capabilities where needed.
- Create/update contingency plans for critical vendors, including plans for insourcing when feasible.
- Establish and/or strengthen vendor risk monitoring tools to be more predictive in monitoring the health and cybersecurity of your high-risk vendors.
- Audit your vendor contracts to identify gaps when compared to your own standard contractual provisions, and amend existing contracts to comply with the contractual standards.
- Review your vendor management system to ensure it is accurate and complete with the vendor information, contracts and assessment tools you need -are at your fingertips – regardless of where you are working from.
One additional note .
As you think about business continuity with your vendors, you should plan as if you are going to have multiple ‘response’ phases. Or even better, ensure you have a really good continuous monitoring and communication process in place that becomes part of your regular vendor management process.
Using a systematic approach to manage business continuity with critical vendors is the best way to ensure consistency in vendor management activities both now and into the future. If you’re looking for additional information on business continuity standards, here’s a link to an article on ISO 22301 which is a recognized international standard for business continuity management systems.
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Navigating the resilience landscape: understanding and implementing iso 22301.
An introduction to ISO 22301 (Business Continuity Management)
Before we start: Key terms & acronyms
ISO 22301 mentions standard-specific terms throughout. For the purpose of this blog, to help you understand the fundamentals of this standard, we have written the terms in full. However, you may come across ISO 22301 acronyms elsewhere, such as:
BCM = Business Continuity Management
BCMS = Business Continuity Management System
BCP = Business Continuity Plan
BIA = Business Impact Assessment
What is the ISO 22301 standard?
ISO 22301 (Business Continuity Management) provides a basis for planning to ensure your long-term survivability following a disruptive event. Put simply, it helps establish a comprehensive process to ensure the continuation and improvement of business in the face of whatever challenges your organisation may encounter. The COVID-19 pandemic is an extreme example of this, where virtually all businesses had to pivot quickly in order to survive. ISO 22301 identifies the fundamentals of business continuity management, providing a basis for understanding, developing and implementing it within your organisation. The ISO 22301 standard specifies the requirements to:
Identify crucial risk factors already affecting your organisation
Understand your organisation’s needs and obligations
Establish, implement and maintain your business continuity management system
Measure your organisation’s overall capability to manage disruptive incidents
Guarantee conformity with your stated business continuity policy
What is required to implement ISO 22301?
Implementing ISO 22301 requires a systematic approach. It focuses on understanding the organisation's needs to establish a robust business continuity management system. Business continuity is a major topic to tackle in any business. To help you get started, we break down what the creation of a business continuity management system involves: Leadership commitment Leadership must be involved in defining roles, policies, and objectives. Before embarking on your implementation journey, you must have this top management support from the start. Gap analysis As with any ISO standard, we recommend you start with a gap analysis . This is key to understanding what is already in place from a resilience perspective, and what vulnerabilities must be addressed. Context review A context review enables you to understand the wider internal and external issues that can impact the business – both positively and negatively. It also acts as a starting point to identify interested parties that may need to get involved with your business continuity plan (BCP). For example, key suppliers your business may depend upon. Business impact assessment (BIA) and risk assessment Both of these require you to look at the activities undertaken by your organisation that enable you to run your business effectively – generating profit and satisfying customer needs. By reviewing these key activities, and then fully understanding the potential risks that may disrupt your ability to perform, you can start exploring where you may need a ‘Plan B’ – effectively your business continuity strategy and plans. A robust business impact assessment will look at:
Your activities and what they support in terms of services and other departments
The impact of disruption on the business (i.e. reputation, financial penalties, legal compliance, revenue, etc)
Defining your maximum period of disruption
Understanding how to recover your position if a disaster strikes (e.g. backup data)
Business continuity plans Your business impact and risk assessment results will help develop appropriate business continuity and supporting response plans. Response plans look to cover:
Any assumptions made in the plan
Responsibilities (including who can invoke and stand down a response)
Business recovery objectives
Who and/or what is impacted
Recovery strategy at a high level
Communication requirements
Ideally, response plans then walk through the plan for the following three stages:
Emergency phase (incident reported)
Recovery phase (response strategy and plan)
Restoration phase (return to normal operations)
Integration with other ISO standards
ISO 22301, like many ISO standards, is based on the Annex SL framework . This framework provides a high-level structure that enables standards to integrate seamlessly. Examples of ISO standards that can effectively integrate with ISO 22301 are: ISO 9001 (Quality Management) : Integration with quality management systems enhances consistency and efficiency in organisational processes. ISO 27001 (Information Security Management) : Aligns business continuity with information security, ensuring data protection during disruptions.
ISO 14001 (Environmental Management) : Joint implementation can help manage environmental risks and their impact on business continuity.
Adopting ISO 22301 elements into a management system
You can benefit from incorporating the key elements of ISO 22301 into your existing management system, even if you aren't yet ready for certification.
How does Blackmores help clients with ISO 22301?
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Are You Asking the Right Questions? Evaluating Vendors for Continuity Risk
Apr 4, 2019 | Business Insurance , Risk Management
It is important to meet with a current or prospective vendor to discuss business continuity planning. However, it’s often difficult to understand how the vendor’s continuity plan aligns with your own plan and needs. Asking the right questions can help.
Questions to Ask Yourself
First, ask yourself these questions to help determine who your critical vendors are. They will be the ones that can have a major impact on your business if they are unable to sufficiently operate after a business interruption.
- Which vendors will have the biggest impact on the company if they suffer an interruption? How quickly will the impact occur? (This question helps you determine your critical vendors.)
- How are my most critical vendors involved in my recovery strategy?
- What interruptions are most likely to occur that could threaten my critical vendors?
Questions for Your Critical Vendors
Many businesses simply run through a checklist of questions when vetting their vendors. Instead of using general criteria, ask questions that relate directly to the specific products/services your vendors provide for you. Assessing the quality of your vendors’ recovery capabilities in areas that are important to your own business continuity will help you the most in this process.
The following questions will help you better understand your vendors’ real business continuity risks:
- What is your recovery plan for the products and services we receive from you?
- What strategies have you put in place in order to respond to the loss of critical resources for the products and services we receive from you? (For example, the loss of your computer systems, workplace, employees or your own vendors.)
- In the last 12 months, have you conducted an employee disaster recovery training exercise of the computer systems needed to provide us with the products and services we receive from you? If so, please share your results.
Understanding your critical vendors’ business interruption resiliency and recovery capabilities will help you feel more secure doing business with them. Valent Group can help you go beyond basic vendor risk management and assist you in getting your business back up and running after an interruption. Contact one of our risk consultants or read more about our portfolio of risk management services.
Information abstracted from Zywave’s “Business Continuity Risk – Asking the Right Questions” article.
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The 15 Best Business Continuity Software and Tools for 2024
- Best Practices ,
Solutions Review’s listing of the best business continuity software is an annual mashup of products that best represent current market conditions, according to the crowd. Our editors selected the best business continuity software based on each solution’s Authority Score; a meta-analysis of real user sentiment through the web’s most trusted business software review sites and our own proprietary five-point inclusion criteria.
The editors at Solutions Review have developed this resource to assist buyers in search of the best business continuity software and tools to fit the needs of their organization. Choosing the right vendor and solution can be a complicated process — one that requires in-depth research and often comes down to more than just the solution and its technical capabilities. To make your search a little easier, we’ve profiled the best business continuity software providers all in one place. We’ve also included platform and product line names and introductory software tutorials straight from the source so you can see each solution in action.
Note: The best business continuity software is listed in alphabetical order.
The Best Business Continuity Software
Platform: Archer Business Resiliency
Description: Archer Business Resiliency enables users to identify and catalog their organization’s mission-critical processes and systems, as well as develop detailed business continuity and disaster recovery plans to protect their business from disruption. The platform offers incident management capabilities, which gives users the ability to quickly evaluate the criticality of an incident, determine the appropriate response procedures, and assign response team members based on factors such as business impact and regulatory requirements. Additionally, Archer Business Resiliency offers a coordinated and automated approach to business continuity and disaster recovery planning, testing, and execution.
Learn more and compare products with the Solutions Review Data Pr otection Buyer’s Guide.
Platform: Arcserve Continuous Availability
Description: Arcserve offers several different backup products, including Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), Arcserve Replication and High Availability, Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct, UDP Cloud Hybrid, and a legacy offering. UDP provides comprehensive Assured Recovery for virtual and physical environments with a unified architecture, backup, continuous availability, migration, email archiving, and an easy-to-use console. Arcserve Continuous Availability ensures business continuity with asynchronous, real-time replication and automatic failover to prevent downtime and data loss. Recovery testing can be fully automated or performed on a scheduled basis.
Platform: Asigra Cloud Backup
Description: Asigra is built for cloud computing environments and designed to offer backup efficiencies by allowing enterprises to capture, ingest, and store less data. Designed for compatibility with public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures, the Asigra platform is equipped with agentless software architecture, global deduplication, and data compression technology along with NIST FIPS 140-2 certified security. Asigra also offers ransomware protection, business continuity, and compliance management. These platforms offer bi-directional malware detection, deep MFA, immutable retention, and variable repository naming. In addition, the vendor reduces recovery time objectives and eliminates silos of backup data.
Platform: Axcient x360Recover
Description: Axcient offers a single solution that incorporates data protection, disaster recovery, archiving, and test/dev. Axcient x360Recover offers flexible deployments and ease of management to MSPs. The vendor also provides two self-service platform options that can be managed by a single user: Axcient Business Recovery Cloud, which is the legacy solution, and Axcient Fusion. Axcient Fusion is built to run on the public cloud, and both platforms offer one-hour and eight-hour RTO options. Axcient enables users to mirror their entire business in the cloud, thereby simplifying data access and restoration, failovers, and virtualization.
- Castellan Solutions
Platform: Castellan Platform
Description: Castellan Solutions provides business continuity software to organizations of all sizes. The vendor’s SaaS platform enables users to leverage automation and intelligence to solve operational resilience, crisis management, and emergency notification challenges in a single centralized location. Additionally, through fully integrated business impact analyses, risk assessments, and plan development functionality, users can set business continuity requirements and create visualizations summarizing the entire, end-to-end value chain. The solution also offers embedded alerts and emergency notifications.
Platform: Cohesity SiteContinuity
Description: Cohesity is a data management company that manages, protects, and extracts value from enterprise data. The provider’s flagship tool, Cohesity DataProtect, safeguards a wide range of data sources on a single web-scale platform. The solution can be deployed on-premises on qualified platforms in the data center, public cloud, and on the edge. Cohesity SiteContinuity is the automation and orchestration engine that powers Cohesity’s unified data protection portfolio. The tool delivers near-zero RTO with hot standby and automated recovery of a single application or an entire site within minutes on a secondary site or cloud.
Platform: Commvault Complete Data Protection
Description: Commvault provides data protection and information management software to help organizations protect, access, and use all of their data economically. The provider offers Commvault Complete Data Protection, which is an all-in-one solution combining Commvault Backup & Recovery with Commvault Disaster Recovery for enterprise-level data protection software. The solution provides backup, replication, disaster recovery orchestration, copy data management, scale-out architecture, ransomware protection, migration support for data and application, and a web-based user interface. Additionally, Commvault Complete Data Protection delivers fast VM, application, and storage snapshot replication with flexible RPO/RTO.
Platform: Datto Unified Continuity
Description: Datto offers backup and disaster recovery appliances, Software as a Service ( SaaS ) data protection, and managed networking products. Datto is offered for data on-prem in a physical or virtual server or in the cloud via SaaS applications. Datto Unified Continuity offers a suite of business continuity platforms, including SIRIS, ALTO, Cloud Continuity for PCs, and SaaS Protection. The vendor is completely channel-driven and recently released SIRIS 4, a business continuity and disaster recovery solution built for MSPs. Datto also boasts nine data center locations worldwide, including the U.S., Canada, Iceland, the U.K., Germany, Australia, and Singapore.
Platform: FalconStor StorGuard
Description: FalconStor provides data protection and recovery services. FalconStor StorGuard enables storage virtualization and optimizes efficiency across heterogeneous storage and networks, deliver centralized management and continuous availability of primary data for business continuity. The platform’s built-in WAN-optimized replication with compression provides improved efficiency and cost reduction. The provider’s tool, RecoverTrac also automates complex and error-prone manual disaster recovery operations, allowing any associated applications and services to be brought back online as quickly as possible.
- Fusion Risk Management
Platform: Fusion Framework System
Description: Fusion Risk Management’s Fusion Framework System enables users to leverage objective risk insights that help to audit, analyze, and improve business operations. The platform also offers continuity planning capabilities, allowing users to sequence their actions based on dependency and what-if analysis, rather than static plans. Additionally, Fusion Framework System enables users to prioritize, set, and maintain impact tolerances to learn over time what their organization can withstand with regard to disaster.
Platform: Oracle Risk Management Cloud
Description: The Oracle Risk Management Cloud delivers automated advanced security and transaction monitoring to strengthen financial controls, ensure the separation of duties, stop fraud, and streamline audit workflows. The solution enables users to create a risk-intelligent culture at their organization by collaborating with business owners through periodic surveys, assessments, and dashboards. Additionally, users can calculate risks by using analysis and context models in order to determine the best course of action.
- Premier Continuum
Platform: Premier Continuum ParaSolution
Description: Premier Continuum is a business continuity software solution provider, aiming to help clients increase their level of organizational resilience. Its flagship platform, ParaSolution centralizes, standardizes, and automates business continuity management operations. To enhance efficiency, ParaSolution offers a quick-start data improt engine, pre-built templates, assessment templates, fully configurable workflows, real-time plan updates, and an ISO 22301 self-assessment tool. The platform also provides a BC module that integrates BIA, risk assessment, crisis management, and reporting, as well as vendor risk assessment capabilities.
Platform: Quantivate Business Continuity
Description: Quantivate is a leading provider of web-based business continuity, risk management, and compliance software and service solutions. The vendor’s product portfolio includes a comprehensive suite of applications for business continuity, vendor management, enterprise risk management, information security, and internal audit management. Quantivate offers a wide range of business continuity services in its Governance, Risk, and Compliance Suite, including emergency operations center plans, continuity of operations plans, hurricane plans, full business impact analyses, threat and vulnerability assessments, RPO/RTO documentation, exercises, and a maturity roadmap.
- Veritas Technologies
Platform: Veritas NetBackup Resiliency Platform
Description: Veritas Technologies provides backup and recovery, business continuity, information governance, and storage management tools. Its flagship NetBackup product is a single and scalable solution that can protect physical, virtual , and cloud workloads. Multitenant support is optional, and the solution is available on a converged platform that requires minimal administration, even in large environments. The NetBackup Resiliency Platform offers automated, orchestrated recovery for multi-tier applications in the cloud and on-prem with added APIs to optimize time and resources. Additionally, the solution ensures compliance with stringent SLAs through audit reports and non-disruptive recovery rehearsals.
Platform: Zerto IT Resilience Platform
Description: Zerto offers an IT Resilience Platform, which combines backup, disaster recovery, and cloud mobility into one converged solution. Through an enterprise-scale, the provider’s software platform delivers continuous availability, which minimizes downtime. Additionally, IT Resilience simplifies workload mobility to freely protect, recover, and move applications across hybrid and multi-clouds. Users can replace their legacy solutions through Zerto’s single platform. Zerto also powers resiliency offerings for Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and AWS. The provider was recently acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
This article was written by Tess Hanna on December 26, 2023
- Best Business Continuity Software
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Tess Hanna is an editor and writer at Solutions Review covering Backup and Disaster Recovery, Data Storage, Cloud Computing, and Network Monitoring. Recognized by Onalytica in the 2021 "Who's Who in Data Management," and "Who's Who in Automation" reports. You can contact her at [email protected]
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Red Flags Within Your Vendor’s Business Continuity Plan
Significant events, including natural disasters and massive cybersecurity breaches, will not only impact your vendor’s operations, but yours as well. your data could be lost, your processes can be slowed or stalled, and your reputation could be hurt..
To protect your organization and stay proactive, you need to understand a vendor’s Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) , their processes of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats.
To do so, your organization should be reviewing the vendor’s BCP annually as part of your ongoing monitoring after you’ve selected and contracted with them. You must determine if there are any issues to be concerned about. But what would be considered a red flag?
You need to recognize the signs of a vendor in crisis. Here’s a list of common red flags to be aware of when performing risk assessments of your vendor’s BCPs:
- Disproportionate net sales to the amount of time a vendor has been in business
- A lack of IT disaster recovery focus
- No record of staff training documentation
- Lack of updates or tests over a substantial period
- Little attention to complaint management and tracking or remediation
- No oversight of fourth-party vendors
- BCPs that don’t address products/services that are applicable to your relationship with the vendor
- Inconsistent or non-existent Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)
Infographic: Guidelines for Effective Vendor Onboarding
Mitigate risk while building strong vendor relationships., rtos and rpos.
A BCP also documents and demonstrates the process of how a business will recover from a declared disaster scenario with Disaster Recovery. DR is more reactive than BCP and zeroes in on technology infrastructure and concentrates on accessing data easily following a disaster. It comprises specific steps an organization must take to resume operations following an incident, with response times ranging from seconds to days.
This DR plan incorporates the fundamental principles of RTOs and RPOs. The RTO is the duration of time within which a business process must be restored after a disruption to avoid unacceptable consequences. The RPO is the interval of time during a disruption before the quantity of data lost during that period exceeds the maximum allowable tolerance.
Both RTOs and RPOs quantify what losses might ensue if critical services are disrupted and set targets for re-establishing services based on mitigating potential losses. It’s key that your organization works together with vendors to define realistic RTO and RPO goals.
Let a VRM solution do the hard work for you
When it comes time to review your vendor’s BCP/DR plan, let a vendor risk management (VRM) solution do the work for you:
- Senior analysts can submit, retrieve, and review a completed Business Continuity and Disaster Recover Questionnaire, and request and receive your vendors’ private documents under an open Letter of Authorization.
- A summary view of BCP/DR planning and testing for each vendor can then be created that describes the risk analysis and findings.
- An analysis, final report, and the vendor’s native documents are uploaded into the VRM into your electronic vendor folders.
- You receive a notice when the task is complete and can review everything at your leisure.
An automated VRM solution can help you rest easy knowing your critical vendor reviews are completed on time, each and every year. Don’t ignore the red flags: Verifying that your vendors align with your organization’s strategic and operational goals can prevent a disaster, or at least ease the recovery.
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The Key Components of a Business Continuity Plan
You have a great disaster recovery (DR) plan , and Zerto has helped simplify that even more by allowing your IT organization to consolidate multiple point products with a single, simple, and scalable solution. You have freed up valuable time for your IT operations teams to deliver more innovation as your business transforms. You have adopted the cloud for multiple applications – maybe you’ve moved away from the data center management business and are fully capable of DR to the public cloud – but has your business continuity plan (BCP) evolved alongside your DR plan to ensure holistic success in the event of an unplanned disruption? Even if you can have all those workloads recovered in the cloud or on-premises within minutes, the business operations side needs to be ready to shift in order to mitigate the downtime.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning
According to ISO 22301, a business continuity plan is defined as “documented procedures that guide organizations to R espond, R ecover, R esume, and R estore to a pre-defined level of operations following disruption.” Disaster recovery is a subset of the overall BCP because, without your data, you are at the mercy of whatever disruption found its way into your datacenter. At Zerto, we create software that, at its core, delivers industry-leading recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) , minimizing data loss and disruption time. We also go the extra mile and provide your business with orchestration, automation, and visibility – to help you meet the “ four R’s ” above and bridge the gap between disaster recovery and business continuity .
Having a business continuity plan in place is important because once IT has recovered the downed systems, the team responsible for executing the BCP must initiate their plan to bring operations back up as quickly as possible. Every minute counts. For every minute the business is down, there is revenue loss, brand impact, dissatisfied customers, lost productivity, and much more. So, what exactly is involved in a business continuity plan?
6 Key Components of a Business Continuity Plan
In the previous section, I mentioned that communication during a disruption is one vital aspect of a sound business continuity plan. Before a disaster was declared, there would have been key criteria and triggers before initiating the plan, so we’re off to a good start! Let’s take a closer look at several other critical components of a business continuity plan necessary for successful recovery in the event of an unplanned disruption.
Contact Information and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
The first component of a business continuity plan is contact information along with SLAs. You will need to identify the following:
- Stakeholders
- Key personnel
- Backup site operators
- Providers (equipment, services)
- Emergency responders
- Third-party vendors
- Facilities managers
- Incident response team(s)
- Successors in case key personnel are unavailable or become overwhelmed
- Additional critical third-party personnel
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
A business impact analysis (BIA) will help you identify and predict business disruption consequences and enable you to gather information to develop recovery strategies. Here are some examples of what may be covered in a business impact analysis:
- An understanding of the changes introduced during unplanned disruption
- Legal or regulatory repercussions of unplanned disruption
- Inventory of all business units required for continuity of operations
- Key personnel as well as staff required to support that personnel
- Pre/post-disruption dependencies
- Validation of test plan
- Ranking of priorities & order of operations
- Revenue loss
- Customer service
- Brand/reputation damage
- Identify acceptable RTO
- Identify an acceptable amount of data loss RPO to minimize the overall impact on the business
- Recovery strategy
Risk Assessment
Risk assessment is the process of identifying, understanding and evaluating the potential risks to all aspects of an organization’s operations. Here are some examples:
Hazard Identification – Probability and Magnitude
- Natural Disasters
- Utility Outage
- Cyber Attack
Assets at Risk – Vulnerability Assessment
- Property (buildings, critical I=infrastructure)
- Supply chain
- Systems/equipment
- Business operations
- Regulatory and contractual obligations
- Environment
Impact Analysis
- Property damage
- Business interruption
- Loss of customers
- Financial loss
- Environmental contamination
- Fines and penalties
Identify Critical Functions
Identification of critical functions will reveal what processes are critical to maintaining and running a business in the event of an unplanned disruption. You want to identify your business critical priorities and focus recovery efforts there first. These include but are not limited to:
- Payroll and time tracking
- Revenue operations
- Physical security
- Information security
- Core business functions
- Data protection after recovery
- Identity & access management
Communications
When an unplanned disruption occurs, communication with employees, shareholders, users, customers, and key personnel is critical. Human resource professionals can play a crucial role in ensuring consistent and timely communication between the organizational recovery efforts and staff. When customers are involved, social media has become a vital tool to provide timely updates, as many users turn to social media when incidents arise.
- What is your crisis communication strategy?
- Communication during an event is key to orchestrate personnel, providers, and third-party vendors if required.
Having a plan is one thing, but testing and practicing it is imperative. Having an inadequate plan is about as good as not having a plan at all. It is vital to develop a strategy to routinely test , and test often, to identify gaps in your plan and anticipate any changes along the way.
Having a working test plan will help you:
- Identify gaps or weaknesses in your BCP
- Evaluate the organization’s response to different types of disruptive events
- Improve systems and processes based on your test results
- Confirm that your continuity objectives can be successfully executed against and met
- Update your plan along the way
- Document lessons learned
In conclusion
We understand that unplanned disruptions do not just affect IT operations. They have a domino effect on your entire business! As digital transformation is in full gear, your reliance on technology to remain visible to the world steadily increases. Currently, we find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic; the Atlantic hurricane season is just kicking off, wildfire season is on the horizon, and cyber-attacks are steadily increasing. Is your business prepared? We need to be more proactive than ever when it comes to DR and BCP; in fact, the two strategies should overlap, and both teams on the field should be playing together toward a common goal – resilience .
Learn more key considerations and where modern IT enterprises are heading in the IDC report, “The State of Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Readiness: 2022” .
Gene Torres is a Technology Evangelist at Zerto with 21 years of experience as an IT Professional focusing on data center virtualization and resilience. Prior to Zerto, Gene was a Solutions Engineer before advancing to Enterprise Architect. He lives in Tacoma, WA with his wife, Rhea, and 3 daughters. He maintains his own technology-focused blog as an active vExpert and enjoys gaming, barbecue, and spending time outdoors.
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What Happens When a Critical Third-Party Vendor Doesn’t Have a Good Business Continuity Plan?
By: Venminder Experts on June 7 2023
Unexpected business disruptions are a fact of life. At this point, we’re all aware of how global pandemics can negatively impact every type of business. Or how a cyberattack can affect a supply chain . Buildings and infrastructure can suffer severe damage. Employees may face dangerous working conditions or displacement due to natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, and fires.
The impact of these events can vary, from the suspension of core operations to the need for millions of employees to work from home, or the necessity to completely restructure a business model. And while it’s not possible to control these business-interrupting events, it is possible to plan for them.
Business continuity and disaster recovery planning (BC/DR) involves developing, testing, and maintaining plans to ensure the resilience of a business and establish a protocol for restoring operations in the event of a man-made or natural disaster.
It’s crucial to prioritize business continuity and disaster recovery planning within your organization and set it as an expectation for your vendors. You should also validate your third parties' business continuity and disaster recovery plans and testing results, especially for critical third-party vendors!
What steps can you take to ensure that your vendors are taking Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery seriously, and have robust and thoroughly tested plans in place?
7 BC/DR Elements Your Third-Party Vendor Should Have
- Risk Assessments A business continuity risk assessment identifies, analyzes, and evaluates the business's disruption risks, including vulnerability to threats and existing safeguards.
- The Business Impact Analysis A business impact analysis is a process that forecasts the potential outcomes of disruptions and collects relevant information for devising recovery strategies.
- Recovery Strategies Recovery strategies are backup plans to restore operations after a disruption, which are based on established recovery time objectives.
- Business Continuity Plans A business continuity plan is a document that outlines how an organization will continue to function during and after an emergency or event.
- Disaster Recovery Plans A third-party disaster recovery plan describes how a business can quickly resume operations after an unplanned event.
- Pandemic Plans A pandemic plan is the organization's strategy for providing essential services in the event of an outbreak of an infectious disease.
- Testing & Exercises Testing ensures that the strategies, plans, and procedures that have been put in place are fully understood by all concerned and are fit for purpose on an ongoing basis. Testing is accomplished by undergoing tabletop or live scenario exercises.
What Happens If a Critical Third-Party’s Plan Is Insufficient?
Consider this scenario: You requested a business continuity plan from your critical third-party vendor, and all they've sent you is a one-page BC/DR summary. Or maybe they can't provide one at all. If this is truly a critical third-party vendor, you have a problem. Like financial and SOC reporting, documented evidence of BC/DR is a must-have for every critical vendor.
Faulty BC Plans could result in the following ripple effects:
- Unless a vendor is prepared for business-disrupting events, they risk major delays in resuming uptime.
- You may experience more downtime than allowed in your own BC/DR plans due to the operational delays of your critical vendor.
- Your critical vendor may lose or not be able to recover some of your data.
- Your organization may experience unplanned costs and lost revenue.
- You may ultimately have to worry about your organization's reputation if your critical vendor lacks a solid BC plan. Customers will assume your organization is at fault for any delays or interruptions.
Considerations For Resolving BC/DR Issues
If a critical vendor isn’t capable or willing to produce an adequate business continuity plan, there are steps you can take to address the situation.
If the vendor is unwilling to share a BC/DR plan , make sure you understand why. BC/DR plans often contain sensitive information such as backup data sites or employees' personal contact information. Additionally, your vendor may not want to share information regarding any system, operational, or physical vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited during an unexpected event.
If the vendor has these concerns, consider asking for a highly redacted version of their BC/DR documents. That approach may allow you to see the structure and necessary elements of the plan without revealing confidential vendor details.
What if the vendor is still unwilling to share ?
Fortunately, it’s not the end of the road. Here are three other routes you could take with your vendor:
- Request a copy of the vendor's business continuity and disaster recovery policy
- Ask the vendor to provide a written attestation that their BC/DR plans meet your organization's documented expectations and requirements.
- Increase the frequency of periodic risk assessments and monitoring and enhance your ongoing monitoring by adding vendor risk monitoring and alert services.
Don’t forget the vendor contract
Make sure that BC/DR is included in the contract. It’s a best practice to ensure that the vendor is legally obligated to meet your documented business continuity and disaster recovery expectations and requirements.
At a minimum, the contract should include:
- The vendor's agreement to ensure that it has adequate business continuity measures in place to avoid disruption and mitigate risk in the event of an unforeseen incident
- A requirement for the vendor to immediately notify your organization of any interruption to its business or unavailability of any site
- The definition of business interruptions and failures
- Documented required recovery time objectives (RTOs)
- A description of the vendor's responsibility for back-up and record protection
- A requirement for the vendor to test plans regularly and provide results to your organization
What if my vendor's third-party vendor's business continuity and disaster recovery plans have gaps or deficiencies?
In that case, your organization must determine if the risks presented by the situation are within your risk tolerance. After all, critical vendors, by definition, will seriously impact your organization or its customers should they fail. And critical vendors with poor BC/DR plans can turn a bad situation into a worst-case scenario.
There may be circumstances in which it’s not wise to pursue or continue doing business with that critical vendor. However, there may be times when the gaps and weaknesses in the critical vendor's BC/DR plan are not "deal-breakers" and may be successfully remediated over time with enough effort.
If remediation is the goal, then be sure to do these 9 steps:
- Ensure that the gaps and deficiencies are clearly documented.
- Request remediation actions and timeframes from the vendor to improve or implement plans.
- Document all agreed-upon remediations and timeframes.
- Amend or add language to the contract (whenever possible) detailing the remediation and timeline.
- Get regular updates from the vendor on the remediation process.
- Hold the vendor accountable and track all issues until they are successfully remediated.
- Require evidence of testing and results of remediated BC/DR plans
- Seek a formal risk acceptance from your senior management or the board to ensure appropriate transparency and approval for an exception to the required BC/DR standards until the issue can be remediated.
- Increase the occurrence of your periodic risk assessments and monitoring practices. Also consider enhancing your ongoing monitoring by using vendor risk monitoring and alert services.
Third-party business continuity and disaster recovery plans are essential for your organization and its critical vendors. Poorly developed or missing vendor BC/DR plans should not be taken lightly, especially regarding your critical vendors. If your current vendor is unable to meet your business continuity and disaster recovery needs, it may be time to shop around for a new one.
Infographic
Are your critical vendors included in your BC/DR plans? Read why including them may help reduce the impact of an event, such as a data breach or a natural disaster.
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Vendors need to be considered as partners in continuity planning, and organisations may support vendors with recommendations to other clients. This article suggests a more practical way to ensure vendor continuity, based on consultancy and industry experience across the public and private sectors, with the objectives of:
The Basics of a Vendor Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Report Let's discuss the basics of vendor business continuity. Listen as we discuss basic key facts to know about a vendor's business continuity plan report.
Evaluation Your Vendor's Business Continuity Plan To verify that all adequate regulations are in place, review the following six areas of your vendor's BCP: Personnel loss and planning Relocation strategy Remote access availability Facility loss contingencies Crisis communication strategy Testing procedures that include: Annual testing
its business continuity programme, companies are rarely able to understand how the vendor's continuity programme aligns with their own resiliency and recovery needs. After an organisation has reached a mature level of operational resiliency and recoverability by developing its own business continuity management (BCM) processes and mechanisms, it
You should incorporate the following steps in creating your business continuity plan: Prioritize supplied materials/products Assess the risk of current suppliers Develop a list of vetted alternative suppliers for critical and/or at-risk materials/products
1 Assess your vendor dependencies Be the first to add your personal experience 2 Establish clear expectations and SLAs Be the first to add your personal experience 3 Monitor and manage vendor...
8 min read A vendor business continuity plan (BCP) is a vital component of an organization's business strategy. A BCP will help ensure that your vendors will continue to provide products and services to your organization at an accepted level of availability, amid a business disrupting event.
11 Tips for Reviewing Vendor Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans By: Venminder Experts on October 20 2020 3 min read When major storms are a brewing, we can't help but wonder about all the people that stand to be affected. We don't mean the grocery stores and their empty shelves, or the gas stations with empty pumps.
A business continuity plan is a practical guide developed by companies to enable continuous operations in the event of major business disruptions like natural disasters and global lockdowns. Business continuity planning usually involves analyzing the impact of disrupted business processes and determining recovery strategies with management.
Business continuity planning (BCP) ... software, and vendors. Once completed, the business continuity plan needs to be tested and exercised to ensure that it works as expected. Business continuity management (BCM) is a holistic approach to identifying possible business risks and their impact on operational processes. It combines emergency ...
Business continuity is an important and timely topic for clients at CBIZ. By utilizing Mark and Jennifer's expertise and partnership, our team can help you strategize, build and implement a preparedness plan specifically for you. Recession or not, we have resources to help your business master this moment of high interest rates, labor ...
Ensuring business continuity with your critical vendors requires not only responding to (and potentially recovering from) a continuity event, but also ensuring you have the right plan, controls and oversight in place to ensure stability for the long haul. Here are 19 best practices to manage business continuity with your critical vendors.
Their business continuity planning efforts considered not only their own ability to weather disruptions, but also the resilience of their third-party ecosystem of vendors and suppliers. They had effective ways of communicating both with their third parties and with their customers, and as a result, they improved their reputation and brand.
Jul 29, 2014,11:00am EDT Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Vetting your vendors from a business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) perspective is hot, hot, hot these...
An introduction to ISO 22301 (Business Continuity Management) Resilience and continuity planning are more critical than ever. ISO 22301 (Business Continuity Management) is a globally recognised standard guiding organisations to establish, implement and maintain an effective business continuity management system (BCMS). This blog delves into the ISO 22301 standard and its requirements.
Valent Group can help you go beyond basic vendor risk management and assist you in getting your business back up and running after an interruption. Contact one of our risk consultants or read more about our portfolio of risk management services. Information abstracted from Zywave's "Business Continuity Risk - Asking the Right Questions ...
The 15 Best Business Continuity Software and Tools for 2024 By Tess Hanna Best Practices Solutions Review's listing of the best business continuity software is an annual mashup of products that best represent current market conditions, according to the crowd.
In this 90-second podcast, you're going to learn 11 items to look for in your critical vendor's business continuity plan (BCP). We have a team of qualified information technology professionals, such as CISSPs, who analyze vendor business continuity plans for our clients daily. Here are 11 items to look for: The business impact analysis.
First, business continuity planning. Business continuity planning allows for organizations to ensure that their own and their vendors' key operations, products and services continue to be delivered either in full or at a predetermined, and accepted, level of availability. Second, disaster recovery planning. Disaster recovery planning includes ...
When it comes time to review your vendor's BCP/DR plan, let a vendor risk management (VRM) solution do the work for you: . Senior analysts can submit, retrieve, and review a completed Business Continuity and Disaster Recover Questionnaire, and request and receive your vendors' private documents under an open Letter of Authorization.
According to ISO 22301, a business continuity plan is defined as "documented procedures that guide organizations to R espond, R ecover, R esume, and R estore to a pre-defined level of operations following disruption."
Business continuity planning (BCP) is important to you and your vendors. Listen to this podcast as we talk about the fundamentals and guide you through creating or reviewing BCPs - the appropriate regulatory guidance to follow, what to plan for, what to restore first and how to recover. Available on You may also be interested in:
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be further leveraged for business continuity, with a 2022 Deloitte survey revealing that 76% of respondents plan to increase investments in AI to gain more ...
A business continuity plan is a document that outlines how an organization will continue to function during and after an emergency or event. Disaster Recovery Plans A third-party disaster recovery plan describes how a business can quickly resume operations after an unplanned event. Pandemic Plans