‘Futureproofing’ - the process of active analysis

By Geary W. Sikich

Overview
The ability to effectively respond to and manage the consequences of an event in a timely manner is essential to ensure an organisation's survivability in today’s fast paced business environment. With the emergence of new threats and the increasing exposure of companies to traditional threats, an integrated approach to business continuity planning is essential.

The integrated approach, as presented in this article, is based on the concept of graceful degradation and agile restoration. ‘Graceful degradation’ refers to the ability of an organisation to identify the event, classify it into a level of severity, determine its consequences, establish minimal stable functionality, devolve to the most robust less functional configuration available and to begin to direct initial efforts for rapid restoration of services in a timely fashion.

The article is broken down into the following main sections:
* Introduction
* Hazard, threat, risk, vulnerability and consequence analysis
* Strategy for graceful degradation and agile restoration.
* Business impacts matrix
* Active analysis methodology

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•Date: 15th October 2004 •Region: US/World •Type: Article •Topic: BC plan development
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