Have You Considered Every Possible Business Disruption?

OVERLAND PARK, KS–(Marketwired – July 01, 2015) – The term “business continuity” might bring to mind regulatory compliance or recovering from disasters like hurricanes or riots. One might also think about IT failures, server crashes, lost email, and business critical systems being unavailable.

These are definitely business continuity scenarios that should be planned for, but businesses also need to understand how quickly they need to be back up and running, how much work or data they can lose, and how certain crises will impact the company. They must ensure they can safely and efficiently continue operations. Companies spend considerable resources to prepare for unplanned events to best help their customers and keep their employees safe.

Some companies even plan for other types of business interruptions such as snow and widespread illness that prevent key or sufficient numbers of employees from making it to work for short or extended periods of time. Laptops, VPNs, SaaS software and high-speed Internet all can fit into remote working plans when coming to the office is impractical or impossible.

Many companies, however, do not have contingency plans for vendors that perform necessary services. Several scenarios exist that could disrupt a vendor relationship. A supplier could become a competitor. A key vendor may experience a financial hardship that impacts its ability to deliver. An accident or natural disaster could affect a supplier’s or service provider’s ability to meet its contracted requirements.

Yet even with these risks, many companies do not have backup vendors vetted to perform the processes and contracts on the ready or plans to invest in or buy the vendors if they cannot be replaced. More and more companies are being held responsible for the failures of their vendors. Customers don’t care if they placed an order from a company and a vendor failed to deliver the critical parts or services. They hired that company and expect them to deliver. Financial services companies, healthcare organizations and other organizations are being required to ensure their outsourced processes can withstand stresses and keep running.

Even ‘less critical’ processes need continuity plans, as exemplified by the experience of a Kansas City-based company that started small and grew beyond a service provider’s capabilities.

When the company opened its doors, it contracted with a local, mom-and-pop janitorial firm. They stayed with that janitorial operation even as they grew. One day, sickness prevented the janitorial company from cleaning the office, which by then was much bigger than its first space. The janitorial company could not provide clean working conditions for what had become hundreds of workers at the growing business. The growing business had to quickly react and find a new provider to serve its needs.

Temporarily losing a cleaning service may not seem like an issue worthy of planning against. But ask employees what will affect their work environment more: unclean bathrooms and full trash cans or hypothetical tornado damage that will likely never occur. These kinds of situations can be identified and prioritized, then tied to the appropriate business continuity plan, within a governance, risk and compliance platform, like LockPath’s Keylight.

So when looking at business continuity, make sure all the processes required to run the business are accounted for, not just disaster recovery and IT systems continuity.

About LockPath
LockPath is a market leader in corporate governance, risk management, regulatory compliance (GRC) and information security (InfoSec) software. The company’s flexible, scalable and fully integrated suite of applications is used by organizations to automate business processes, reduce enterprise risk and demonstrate regulatory compliance to achieve audit-ready status. LockPath serves a client base of global organizations ranging from small and midsize companies to Fortune 10 enterprises in more than 15 industries. The company is headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas.

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