Business Continuity Planning Software

The use of a business continuity planning software is to ensure that your business is prepared to respond to and recover from any type of disruption with minimal impact. Planning is no longer an option, it’s a necessity. There are many shocking stories of companies that have gone out of business because they didn’t have a valid plan.

How can you properly plan for a disaster if you have little idea of the likely impacts on your business/organization on different scenarios?

What to Look for in Business Continuity Planning Software

As we had covered the reason and the general steps in creating a business continuity plan, we will be looking at some business continuity planning software now.

As the title suggest, business continuity planning software is the use of a computerized system to plan for the implement of your business continuity plan. With the advance of technology, most of the software today will not just plan, but also covers related functionalities such as build and maintain, respond to disasters, and even assess and rate the resiliency of your vendors and supply chain.

One important note is, prior to creation of the plan itself, it is essential to consider the potential impacts of disaster and to understand the underlying risks: these are the foundations upon which a sound business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan should be built.

Different from the features of business healthcare computing software for occupational health, when you are scouting for a business continuity planning software, you need to check out some important points.

5 Points to Note in Business Continuity Planning Software

1. Regulations and Industry Standards
Could the software keeping abreast of the changing BCM regulations, industry standards and best practices?

2. User Friendliness
Could it be effortlessly used by even part-time planners? Could it reduces the amount of manual efforts and eliminates the mistakes that would have been made when this work is done manually?

3. Scalability
Can it be customized to suit your planning preferences and current situations? What about future expansions as your requirements grow? Does it has the ability to create and manage plans for software applications, business processes, departments, business units, facilities and enterprises, so that you could produce plans for any organization level ?

4. Security
How secure is the software? For example, do they have role-based access controls, with individual permissions, so that you maintain security and control?

5. Support
Having immediate access to your most up-to-date copy of your plans is essential in a disaster situation. What are the support available from the software vendor? What is the response time when crisis occur? Do they have specialized team to back you up in a disaster recovery?

Resources to Business Continuity Planning Software

One of the most relevant provider of business continuity planning software is SunGard. SunGard provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented five times. For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.

*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com

If you want to source for more provider of business continuity planning software, look no further than Google.

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