Are You Tired Of Unsatisfactory Audits?

Love or hate them, auditors are here to stay. Sooner or later, your business continuity management (BCM) process will be audited, and regardless of how well you’ve implemented a continuity plan, they always manage to find points of non-compliance.

With the ever growing number of local and international standards (Business Continuity Institute, Disaster Recovery Institiute International, Australian Standards HB292/293, ISO/IEC 24762, and others), is there a secret to preventing the classic “red, red, red, orange, red” audit report for your BCM program?

In our experience, the organisations that best avoid the ‘audit red-tape’ are those tha implement an ongoing plan of proactive BCM management and governance; including aspects such as plan documentation updates, regular testing, re-training of staff and board/management reporting. Strategic and operational changes in business structure and functions need to be catered for, as well as the vast rate of change in your IT production environments – disaster recovery infrastructure needs to be kept in sync if if is ever going to be effective.

Whilst it sounds obvious, the effort required to keep your BCM process up to date on an on-going basis, even say quarterly, is far less challenging than waiting 18 months and doing a major update to out of date plans and documentation.

OpsCentre Continuity Managed Service, OCMS, is a solution you may wish to consider. We provide ‘oursourced’ management of your continuity process, plans, training, testing and infrastructure, not only ensuring that unexpected audits are passed with flying colours, but also that, if you ever need to invoke your plans due to a real incident, you’re confident the plans are current and will save your business from disaster.