What’s the worst type of risk? It’s the one you have not yet identified—the surprise that’s waiting to sneak up and strike at the most inopportune time. It can be a security breach, a bad PR move, a tornado, or the actions of a disgruntled employee. The best way to reduce risk’s impact is to test, recognize, and prepare for it with business continuity management, planning, and training.
ImageQuest provides banks, financial institutions, advisory firms, and other regulation-governed organizations with the foresight they need to identify and prepare for the unexpected.
Let’s be honest—the reason you’re searching for business continuity management services is that you’re mandated to complete an industry-standard business-impact analysis. It’s like your municipality demanding that your rental property have two exits, or else they won’t issue that certificate of occupancy. You have to do it.
But just because you have to do it doesn’t mean you won’t gather valuable information along the way. You see, it’s also like having a spare car key and a spare house key. No one is requiring you to keep an extra home or car key, but it’s a really good idea.
When you trust ImageQuest for business continuity management, not only will you fulfill your legal obligations, but you’ll also gain valuable insight into your business’s potential threats, risk tolerance, and ways to minimize active threats, failure events, and operational downtime.
Let’s get started by scheduling a business continuity consultation.
Let’s take the first step to getting those results—so your bank or other institution is better prepared to handle risk (while staying in compliance).
You’ve discovered that you must have a business continuity plan in place. So you look for the easiest way to get it done—fast. After all, you’re on a timeline and don’t have the workforce to dedicate to it.
You turn to Google, find a template, and send it to the IT department.
While it may not look like it on the surface, deep down, enterprise risks are not just technology-related. Your business continuity plan will be driven by IT; however, too often, a person assigned the task in one department can’t understand the risk shouldered in other areas. It’s like living in a duplex. You might hear some shouting or the occasional bump in the night, but you really have no idea what’s going on or if there’s risk involved. In the same way, your IT department’s personnel might hear rumblings about shortcomings in other departments, but in most cases, they have no way of fully understanding or assessing those risks.
A business continuity advisor will look at your operations as a whole for holistic, comprehensive intelligence into risk in all areas. This takes the target off the IT department’s back and delivers better results.
First, let’s talk about what risk really is. It’s the potential loss that could be experienced due to a threat. Every organization has a tolerance for risk. Unfortunately, many of them don’t discover what that tolerance is until a threat becomes reality.
And yes, risk does evolve. That’s because risk is highly dependent upon your site (where you are), operations (what you do and how you do it), demand (the pressures on your personnel, inventory, and services), and your structure (who’s in charge of what).
As you know, all of these operational attributes are subject to change on a nearly daily basis, so identifying one risk (or even your most prominent risks) and then forgetting about managing it can lead to unwanted surprises and more problems. After all, the availability of your revenue-generating business functions relies on their management—because without them, the company runs the risk of losing what it needs most, when it’s most needed.
There’s always more than one type of risk, but you can have more control over your response when you recognize the ones that could affect your organization:
What do you do if X happens? Regardless of what caused it? This approach does more than identify specific causes because, let’s be honest, business can be halted by a mishandled PR event just as quickly as it can by a tornado. The continuity plan will act as your Plan B in any scenario.
Redundancy is crucial—whether it’s a spare server to store information in case of data loss or a spare key to your office filing cabinet. The goal is to keep the lights on, keep the revenue flowing, and pay your team on time.
When something happens, there might not be a smoking hole in the ground where your business once was, but the impact is bound to stretch into one or more of these areas:
When you have a business continuity management professional working for you, you can eliminate guesswork or opinion-based definitions from those who have a limited understanding of your organization’s operations as a whole.
Instead, you’ll have a 360° view from an objective expert trained in business continuity management.
When you partner with ImageQuest, you won’t have to wonder what the monetary impact of threats will be. We’ll survey your operations and assign two dollar amounts to potential incidents—one that applies if you have a business continuity plan and one if you don’t.
That’s what we call Quantification, and it gets to the question in every business owner’s mind: “What will this cost me?” It will also help you to choose between spending buckets of money before threats become incidents or spending wheelbarrows of money after something happens.
When a threat becomes an event, it’s important to understand what stage it’s in when it’s discovered. ImageQuest will help you do that. Here’s a simple example to demonstrate:
When we predict full recovery times, we’re not just looking at the time needed to be back up and running but at the time needed to achieve complete recovery.
At ImageQuest, our expertise will help you implement business continuity management that’s unique to your organization at policy, management, and operational levels. You can rest assured that we use NFPA 1600 : 2019, ISO 22301, FFIEC | IT Examination Handbook, OSHA, and NIST 800 Series for guidance, so you’ll be completely compliant.
You don’t have to do this alone—and you shouldn’t. Let’s talk about doing it once, doing it right, and reducing the chances of incidents bringing your business to a halt.
How much do you like surprises? A surprise birthday party might be alright, but no one wants surprises at work—particularly when incidents bring business to a halt.
Surprises can harm your organization’s profit margin, stability, reputation, and employee trust and morale. But when you have a business continuity advisor on your side, you’ll know you’re doing everything you can to foresee natural, man-made, and technological threats, define your risk tolerance, plan for all scenarios, and more.
Let’s see what’s possible—even in the face of surprises—with a business continuity management consultation.