The British Standard for Business Continuity Management (BCM) – BS25999 – allows your organisation to realise business improvements by applying good practice in BCM.
According to BS 25999, BCM is a ‘business-owned, business-driven’ process that establishes a fit-for-purpose strategic and operational framework’ which:
- “Proactively improves an organization’s resilience against the disruption of its ability to achieve its key objectives”
- “Provides a rehearsed method of restoring an organization’s ability to supply its key products and services to an agreed level within an agreed time after a disruption”
- “Delivers a proven capability to manage a business disruption and protect the organization’s reputation, brand, revenues and customer base.”
Source: BS 25999-1: 2006, Section 3.1.
Organisations are looking to adopt BS 25999 for a range of reasons including:
- to enhance their ability to respond effectively to potentially disruptive events
- to enhance and augment their corporate governance regime
- to reduce business risk by applying BS 25999 to their supply chain
- to enhance their competitiveness by using BS 25999 to demonstrate their business resilience to their customers and stakeholders.
Many organisations have plans to address a number of these issues. Depending upon how these plans were originally developed, some organisations may have left themselves unwittingly exposed to BCM issues that had not originally been considered.
However you wish to utilise the Standard, the first step you may need to take towards adopting it is to develop a thorough grasp of how your BCM processes work currently, and how they compare to BS 25999.
Identifying and assessing where your existing BCM processes vary from BS 25999 is the first step to capturing the business value that using the Standard can deliver.
To assist you in this process, SunGard offers a BS 25999 Gap Analysis Service.
SunGard’s BS 25999 Gap Analysis
Recognising that an external view from experienced practitioners is of great value in ensuring that further effort is effectively targeted, SunGard’s BS 25999 Gap Analysis can help you understand to what extent you must adhere to BS 25999 as well as help identify those areas where there is variance.
Through a structured interview process or combined workshop the Gap Analysis will examine your current BCM policies and practices and deliver a short and concise presentation that will allow you and your senior management to understand:
- where your current policies and practices meet BS 25999
- where your polices & practices vary from BS 25999
- where you need to focus your efforts to meet the requirements of BS 25999.
It will identify the key issues and activities that will form the basis of your implementation strategy, and begin to build the business case for adopting BS 25999.
With an experience of Information Availability that is unrivalled, a significant investment in our continuum of services – over £67m in the last 4 years - and the expertise of our Professional Services team, there are few organisations who are better placed to help you achieve your BCM objectives under BS 25999 than SunGard Availability Services.
Not only this, in our capacity as a representative member of Intellect, http://www.intellectuk.org, SunGard was invited to join the BSI committee panel which prepared the BS 25999 Standard for Business Continuity Management. As such, SunGard has played a significant role in the development of the new British Standard.