Business Continuity Planning: Put Numbers on Your Risk

June 4, 2020  Jeff B. Copeland

Cyber war, civil unrest, pandemic, hurricanes -- now more than ever, it's vital to  have business continuity plans ready – and right. Conventional risk management based on qualitative analysis -- essentially best guesses at likelihood and impact -- don't give organizations the clarity they need to make sound financial decisions on alternative plans for business continuity management.

RiskLens uses the FAIR standard for risk quantification to help businesses make sensible plans and choices based on hard numbers. With a RiskLens analysis, organizations first identify the assets at risk, then associate risk scenarios with them, and determine a range of probable loss exposure as a baseline -- then run "what-if" variations to identify scenarios that would reduce loss exposure, finally factoring in costs to find the best cost/benefit options. Analysis results are in financial terms, supporting business impact analysis statements that decision-makers can easily understand and act on.

Here are three takes on how the RiskLens approach improves business continuity planning.

Does Your Business Impact Analysis Leave You Wanting More?

A key part of business continuity planning is business impact analysis (BIA). But it often suffers a fatal flaw, that can compromise the planning stage: It can’t articulate business impact in financial terms.  This post discusses how quantitative risk analysis improves the BIA.

Case Study: Healthcare Services Company Evaluates Business Continuity Plans

The business continuity management team had identified alternatives in the event that a key processing facility couldn't operate -- from renting a backup facility nearby to beefing up activity at company locations out of the region. Read how a RiskLens/FAIR solution clarified the decisions.

Case Study: Financial Institution Communicates Disaster Exposure with RiskLens

This firm gathered data from FEMA to help decide if it was over-exposed to natural disaster by concentrating all its processing centers on one coast. But its existing tools rated every option as “high risk”.  Applying the quantification solution from RiskLens recast the decision in financial terms and pointed the way to a money-saving outcome.