ResilienceONE® is cloud BCP software that analyzes organizations’ risk, automates essential BCP tasks such as objectively determining organizations’ most important business functions, and pinpoints what business functions need to be recovered the quickest to mitigate loss and resume business operations. The web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) uses business process-based metrics and algorithms to help BCP personnel build powerful recovery plans that are aligned with their respective organizations’ goals.

A major enhancement in ResilienceONE® version 5.7 is the development of a Master Recovery Schedule. This feature allows users to easily cross-section their Business Impact Analyses (BIA) and Recovery Timeframe Objectives (RTO) – data and reports that show how an organizations’ people, IT, and vendors are linked, and what steps are needed to recover these assets – in a brief Microsoft® Excel® document.

“Since our inception we have worked with and listened to our fellow business continuity professionals when enhancing our ResilienceONE software,” says Frank Perlmutter, president and co-founder of Strategic BCP. “Our new Master Recovery Schedule report addresses our users’ demands, pinpointing gaps in between recovery capabilities and business requirements and breaking down an organizations’ potential impact using both quantitative and qualitative measures. This report is the ultimate in Business Impact Analyses and can arm planners with the most detailed, unmatched analytics in our industry.”

Other enhancements released include more robust password and security parameters that allow organizations to meet the strictest of security standards. The software’s plan generator was also upgraded allowing users to generate and reorder any system content or attachments in a single document.

“Ease of use reigns supreme in the world of software, but developing powerful, actionable plans is vital in the world of business continuity. Our goal is to offer both,” says Perlmutter. “ResilienceONE develops comprehensive plans, but is also easy-to-navigate software that anyone within an organization can use immediately if a disaster strikes.”

Strategic BCP offers demos of its ResilienceONE® BCP software for the media, business continuity planners and consultants, and executives from organizations of all sizes, from small to mid-sized companies to global enterprises. Please email contact@strategicbcp.com for more information.

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We listen to our customers so they can utilize software that’s easy to navigate and deploy for their customers, the people using their BC plans.

In an effort to continue to develop BCP software based on real user demands, we polled nearly 200 people recently about the software they are currently using. See some of the highlights listed below, and please share your thoughts about the interesting findings.

Major Need: Serving Unlimited Users

More than 50% of respondents said they need to serve an unlimited number of users with their BC software.

Our Take: BC plans need to be utilized by everyone in an organization, not just a few planners. Charging per-seat for BCP software seems counter-intuitive.

Ease-of-Use Reigns Supreme

Over 70% of respondents indicated that ease-of-use is their software’s strongest feature, and over 80% of respondents named ease-of-use in their list of the top three most important items needed in BCP software.

Our Take: We view software as easy to use if the planner’s customers – the people using the plans – can quickly and efficiently deploy the plans. But we realize that “ease of use” is a relative term, so we asked people to explain what it means to them.

To summarize, most respondents suggested that BCP software is easy if:

• “[The] user interface is intuitive such that end-users do not have to undergo detailed training to use the product.”
• “[It can be] understood and used by a C-level executive during an event.”
• “[It is] intuitive to use so that when there’s a disaster, it doesn’t require constant training just to understand how to use the system.”
• “Major training isn’t necessary to get users to build and maintain their plans.”
• “Non-BC users who don’t use the tool often can go in and figure out what they have to do with simple screens and tasks.”

Essential Software Features

Below are the top three essential software features, according to survey respondents.

• Having a single database for all plan components, with no importing/exporting between modules being required.
• Business process mapping capability.
• Data gathering methodology does not lock user into long surveys (i.e. a non-cumbersome approach is used).

Our Take: Modules defeat the purpose of utilizing automated software because there is significant manual configuration needed to make them work. Paying for separate modules can also be very expensive. We’ve seen a shift over the last year in BC planners’ approach to software.

While many planners in the past have focused on the technical side of software, partly due to more companies hosting it internally, planners today are focusing on software’s business implications. Using software to do the heavy lifting – mapping business processes objectively to determine risk points instead of through surveys – allows BC planners to be more effective – and more valuable.

And who really wants to take a long survey to begin with?

Moving Towards the Cloud?

56% of respondents said that they would prefer their software to be hosted by their BCP vendor.  When asked why, responses included “we’re more comfortable with SaaS,” “we don’t want to manage the software,” “it’s easier to have it hosted elsewhere,” and “this will hopefully be better during a crisis.”

Our Take: A large number of people would still prefer to host their software in-house but more are leaning toward external hosting in the cloud. We call ourselves “the leader in BCP cloud software” for a reason – we believe that hosting your business continuity plans on the same servers that he plans are intended to get back online in case of an emergency is a potentially dangerous scenario.

If a disaster strikes and your internal servers hosting your BC plans are affected, how will you utilize those plans?

Support is Critical

76.4% of respondents said they want access to 24x7x365 support with unlimited ability to contact their vendor with any questions or issues, as opposed to paying a la carte for additional questions.

Our Take: We agree! Disasters seldom give warning, so we believe having the peace of mind in knowing that your BC plans will be available and secure is vital. Paying extra for support simply doesn’t make sense to us.

Making the Switch?

50% of the respondents said they were considering switching their BCP software. Reasons included:

• “We need a solution that starts with the BIA and Risk Assessments utilizing BIA – Business processes and the risk assessment following the list of risks that are defined.”
• “Looking for a more effective tool to manage plans and that is easier for our ‘People’ to use.”
• “Our current software is not flexible enough to accommodate specific customer needs.”

In response to this, we’re offering our trade-in program again – it’s back by popular demand. Switch to ResilienceONE® and you won’t pay a penny until your current software contract runs out.

If you’d like to speak to us about this offer or if you have any questions or comments about the survey, comment below or email us at contact@strategicbcp.com.

Register Here

Check back later today for a link to our slides!

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Over 600 people have registered for this webinar already. If you have difficulty presenting your true effectiveness as a BC professional beyond generating plans, you cannot miss this discussion.

Join Strategic BCP and fellow business continuity veterans as we reveal metrics that will “wow” your executives, strengthen your risk management skills, and increase your value to your organization.

We designed this webinar to take you from data collection through delivery. We are even taking it a step further and sharing metrics that our colleagues have used to extend their value beyond the traditional BC job description.

Topics You Will Hear Include:

Data Collection Doom: How to identify and avoid poor data collection methods and bad data that can cannot be analyzed.

Setting Goals for Executive Delivery: How to ask the right questions to align your BC metrics with what executives and business leaders care about most.

Giving Your Metrics Teeth: How to present your analysis and back-up your findings.

See Sample Reports: We’ll show actual reports with the metrics you need to impress your executives and show-off your value.

Examples of Practical Application: Hear directly from pros who use BC metrics to manage risk, spot vulnerabilities others in their organization cannot, and be a manager of overall business evolution.

Metrics are vital in our BC world. Don’t miss this expert discussion about how to use them to your full advantage as a valuable member of your organization.

Register Here

One of the major problems we’ve seen deals with static paper plans. In our experience, static plans, whether they are electronic PDFs or on actual paper, present major challenges during outages due to their outdated nature and inflexibility.

During plan development, distribution for a BC professional can be an administrative nightmare, and tracking who gets what changes is the initial headache. Business continuity software can provide improved access to plans but you need to have an Internet connection or the in-house server/desktop where the plans reside.

With relational database BC software (i.e. not storing plans as documents) housed in the cloud, one should be able to quickly get access to the most current version of their plan – and even better- alter their plan (if needed) to accommodate the current event. In a crisis, real-time interactive updates can be disseminated right away to recovery teams.

However, we do suggest keeping backup plans in PDF form an on paper just in case the Internet is not available. We’re not saying that paper is dead – static files and paper serve as important contingencies if the preferred software method is not available.

If you have reservations about using software for BCP, please share with us below.

For example, you can make software “easy-to-use” with MS Office templates and fill in the blanks right out of the box. But this wouldn’t be very useful since the documents cannot share data, provide company-wide analysis, or act as a “living” plan.

You can easily put templates into SharePoint, but once again the documents remain locked in folders and difficult to share.

As the BC software market continues to proliferate a myriad of additional “easy-to-use” tools, it is important to separate ease-of-use from lack of utility. As I have always said in presentations and webinars, your process and deliverables must cater to your audience (please refer to the “Value Killers” webinar).

Users demand an easy-to-use software interface, planning in plain language, and a streamlined data gathering process (i.e. not a survey that takes them 2 hours to fill out).

Your executives demand useful data for both recovery AND risk management. This second part is where most BC software fails. It is easy to deliver a planning software without analytics. Simply fill in the blanks, put them into a document, and print. If this is all that’s required and you want to get it off your plate (i.e. BC is not your full time job) and you can demonstrate high value to your supervisor in other areas, this may be a perfect way to just get it done.

However, if your livelihood is as a BC professional, you need to not only offer easy software to your users — you must also produce something of value.

As a software vendor, the mathematics, algorithms, and useful reports are what take years to develop and refine. Those features are costly for me to develop. However, a software product’s ease-of-use without these analytical capabilities will fail its customer base.

One final thought: ease of use is a tricky factor to evaluate. After a one-hour software demo, one has seen the software for only a limited time. Like buying a house or a car, you don’t know the great parts and low points until you’ve used it for awhile.

Perform this check to ensure you are getting utility. Have your vendor show you the final output. Is it just a PDF plan? Are the reports just lists of items regurgitated from what you put in? If yes, then you don’t have utility. Ensure that there are useful reports and plans, that you can clearly explain how they will be utilized in your organization, and how the software offers additional insight to you and your executives that you didn’t have before.

Frank Ridder and Alexa Bona from Gartner write that “the immaturity of cloud service contracting means that many have structural deficits.” To that, we’d like to respond that Strategic BCP has been around for over seven years and we’d certainly consider our company and our contracts mature. We strive to provide the best possible service to our more than 25,000 users and our contracts reflect this. We work hard to meet our clients’ privacy and security requirements while staying within their budget. In fact, it’s a company mission to meet the highest possible security and redundancy standards. We take these issues very seriously and we’re EU Safe Harbor-compliant.

Of course when you sign any contract, your lawyers need to make sure you’re protected. Negotiating to make sure the terms are in your favor is a given. We want to make every client we work with happy with our service and our contract terms. Come see what else we’re all about.

What We’ll Cover
It’s no secret – there’s a major buzz around “the cloud.” From managing leads in Salesforce.com to running payroll in QuickBooks, cloud technologies have emerged as popular applications for businesses of all sizes.  In the BCP software realm, cloud computing can be quite powerful. For every BC professional, it is important to understand the concept and its specific application to our profession.

This webinar will put cloud computing in terms that all BC professionals can understand. No technical degrees are required. We will also go beyond the basics and into the key benefits of cloud BCP software, along with important risks that must be properly managed. We will delve into the specific aspects of cost, manageability, security, and redundancy.

Cloud computing is undoubtedly beneficial for many organizations and understanding its specific application in our industry is critical for every BC professional. We look forward to having you join us in this important webinar.

Register Here

You want to start building your BCP as quickly as possible with as little configuration of the software as possible. Users of software packages that require extensive configuration generally abandon it soon after purchase, as both executives and users become frustrated that multiple internal resources have to commit so much time upfront and that real business continuity planning is delayed. Unfortunately, I see this all the time at companies we’re talking to who initially went with another vendor.

The best sources of information on software configuration are people who have used multiple BCP software solutions.  Ask them how long it took to configure each program and which one they like best.

Here’s a trick for spotting software solutions that require extensive training: check the vendor’s website for education or training sections that specify the need for specialized IT training. Beware of training sessions that require complicated skill sets such as database configuration or Crystal Reporting.  These are skills expected of IT professionals. BCP software should not require that you waste precious time and money learning them.

How long did it take you to configure your BCP software?

-Frank

Interactive Incident Management is the concept that your business continuity plan should accommodate the best path to recovery by providing real-time information in a flexible format. If you look at most planning systems, Interactive Incident Management simply means they’ll display a static plan document in Word or PDF on the screen. The bottom line is…the plan ‘is what it is.’

Interactive Incident Management is real-time. It considers the situation at hand and molds the response around best handling the event to limit impact. To best address a real situation, decision-makers need real-time information on the status of their critical infrastructure – their people, facilities, information technology, data, and assets. They next need to know how this status affects them continuing their company’s operations. The appropriate response and recovery measures can then be tailored to meet the situation head-on and limit impact.

Plans that start as paragraphs or static documents, whether on paper or stored electronically, are typically useless. They may provide some guidance in decision-making but rarely are they a step-by-step guide to recovery. Valuable time is wasted coming up with plans on the spot.

In contrast, Interactive Incident Management puts information about operational impact right at a decision-maker’s fingertips. It maps step-by-step normal operations and work-arounds for operations without infrastructure.  All infrastructure items (the people, facilities, information technology, data, and assets mentioned before) are tied directly to operations so decision-makers know immediately what is affected by the event and can utilize their plans accordingly to map the quickest path to recovery. The best plans consider a worst-case scenario where any event of a lesser impact can easily be accommodated by operating that part of the process normally.

Does your BCP software offer real-time incident management? If not, is it time to consider another vendor?

-Frank