Business Continuity and Incident Management: Better Together

In the Better Together blog series, we take a look at how business continuity can support other functional areas by creating an information foundation from the data that business continuity collects from multiple sources across the enterprise. Here, we explore how business continuity and incident management are better together.

It is a fact of life that incidents occur and must be addressed within a business on an almost daily basis. Most are not critical and do not result in a crisis, but some do.

The name “Incident Management” can refer to the activities of several different groups in the enterprise, including enterprise operations centers and application availability command centers (an IT-related function). Regardless of a department or function’s title, the priorities of any group with incident management responsibilities include:

• Resolving incidents of all sizes
• Quickly determining the scope and impact of incidents
• Identifying impacted locations and processes
• Notifying appropriate teams as required for resolution
• Communicating incident status to stakeholders and leadership

The information foundation managed by business continuity can benefit incident management in non-catastrophic production incidents. For example, suppose that a company’s enterprise operations center is notified that due to scheduled electrical transfer switch maintenance, electricity will be disrupted for 48 hours at a certain site the following week. Being proactive, the EOC references the information foundation to determine the impact and discovers that the revenue capture process is dependent on the site.

As a result, the EOC coordinates with representatives from finance, facilities, and IT to ensure that the business-critical revenue capture process can be performed in an alternate facility during the maintenance window. That is the power of the information foundation!

For more real-world examples of the information foundation in action, read our whitepaper Creating the Foundation for Increased Business Resiliency and Efficiency.