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 Learning Objectives

Why do we organize this seminar ?

Many private and public organisations have initiated a Business Continuity Management (BCM) project to prepare for an unplanned event that would cause a major disruption of operations. Although many of these projects mitigate part of the risks related to the continuity of their operations, they may fail to ensure that all processes and crisis scenarios that are highly critical for the organisation have been covered. In addition, BCM is very often not embedded into the organisation and is a one-time effort; as a result, Business Continuity Plans are outdated. Furthermore, many BCM projects are not efficient and take more time to complete than originally foreseen.

Questions answered in this seminar

This seminar addresses typical pitfalls in BCM projects and typical shortcomings in traditional BCM approaches. This seminar intends to:

• Give you a clear picture of what Business Continuity Management is and what the different components are
• Give an overview of where organisations across the globe are in terms of business continuity
• Give a comprehensive view on BCM regulations and standards such as BS 25999
• Help you understand how to ensure proper governance over Business Continuity
• Outline which benefits BCM can deliver
• Give you an understanding of how Business Continuity Management could be integrated into IT processes
• Give an overview of the current trends with regards to Business Continuity Management

Who should attend this seminar ?

Anyone seeking to understand the business continuity risks, seeking an overview of the challenges and solutions when building a Business Continuity Management process:

• Business managers, for a better understanding of the issues
• BCM project leaders, for obtaining a global picture and understanding the issues and solutions
• Auditors seeking to obtain assurance
• Risk and Internal Control managers wanting to mitigate business continuity risks
• IT managers in search of a reality check

 Full Programme

Numerous organisations across the globe, in both private and public sectors, have taken measures to deal with unplanned disruptions of processes, whereas many others have not (yet) taken such measures. You will learn about the preparedness against business disruptions of organisations across the globe. Key Findings from amongst others the Deloitte & Touche Global Security Survey and the Deloitte & Touche Business Continuity Management Survey will be presented. The results will enable you to compare the level of business continuity preparedness of your organisation against other organisations. Additionally, you will get an overview of BCM regulations and standards, such as BS 25999, and IT standards having a BCM component (ITIL, CobiT, …), their practices and applicability.

A good business continuity plan is based on a sound analysis of the risks faced by an organisation. Without a Business Impact Analysis and Risk Assessment you cannot justify your continuity or recovery strategy. If you fail to identify a risk you can neither manage it, nor effectively plan for its consequences. This session examines the impacts on stakeholder trust, reputation, share price and brand equity – and how to minimize them. The speaker will detail how to present BIA results to management, based on experience of several BCM engagements. The speaker will be discussing the calculation of the cost of downtime compared against the Recovery Time Objective and the Recovery Point Objective. The speaker will be sharing what companies currently are spending on disaster recovery and what they should spend - and most importantly how your organisation can maximize disaster recovery investments by selecting the right recovery strategy.

Once you are familiar with the various disaster recovery concepts, it is important to proceed with the selection of a disaster recovery strategy. Your disaster recovery strategy choice will also influence your backup strategy. The speaker will go through the technologies to protect IT resources, e.g. virtualization, data center infrastructure, storage software and hardware. The speaker will also deal with the integration of Disaster Recovery into IT processes.

This presentation deals with the governance over an organisation’s BCM process. The BCM governance framework outlines the decision-making and the accountability structure. Questions that need to be answered to come to an appropriate governance structure include: What responsibilities should be centralized or decentralized within a BCM governance program, e.g. in the context of an international organisation or multi business unit organisation?; What parameters should be taken into account when defining responsibilities? The speaker will also explain how BCM Governance can ensure continuous improvement of your organisation’s BCM management processes capability, how to implement it as well as who should be involved in this effort.

Plan exercising is a critical element of a sustainable and viable Business Continuity Program. Business Continuity exercises provide Business Unit members and / or Application teams with the opportunity to familiarize themselves with recovery procedures. Exercising also helps in revealing plan deficiencies and outdated content. An exercise can be regarded as successful when it measures the effectiveness of the plan against predetermined objectives. Tabletop exercising is the first step of a longer term maturity model. Over time, as the Business Continuity Program develops, the types of exercises will become more sophisticated. The speaker will show examples of tests that were executed at different organisations.

Once your organisation has its plans in place, how often is a formal review conducted? During this session, the speaker will outline: Why conduct a BCM Audit?; How to design and develop the audit program ?; How to assess the BCM Audit results ?; How can you determine the steps to implement or improve the corporation’s Business Continuity measures based on audit findings?; How to define the roles and responsibilities?; What are the common BCM Audit mistakes? This topic will rely on examples of BCM Audit findings.

A major challenge is the positioning Business Continuity with your company's senior management as an invaluable partner. Benchmarks and quantitative measurements are required to accurately determine and prove the effectiveness of your business continuity. During this session you will learn about how to gain support from senior management for business continuity initiatives, by examining them as an investment rather than as a cost center and to craft a persuasive business case for business continuity with numbers.

Risks are constantly evolving and unexpected, new risks may appear. Hence, your Business should consider a holistic approach to Business Continuity Planning. Our speakers will provide advice and guidance on subjects such as pandemic and climate change threats. As Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore stated recently: “It is a mistake to think of the climate crisis as one in a list of issues, it is the issue.” The speaker will also highlight how Green IT and other initiatives can be turned into Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery opportunities.

A new European Directive is in the course of being adopted and will establish the procedure for the identification and designation of European Critical Infrastructures (ECI’s), and a common approach to the assessment of the need to improve the protection of such infrastructures in order to contribute to the protection of people. You will learn about the requirements of this Directive.

 Speakers

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