Preparing for Certification

The Planning Portal > What Are Your Needs? > Preparing for Certification

The Planning Portal was designed not only to enable higher levels of organizational responsiveness and recoverability, but also compliance with emerging best practices, requlatory requirements and industry-independent standards. The Planning Portal is fully compliant with the characteristics and specifications contained within BS 25999 and NFPA 1600.

The following table compares key BS 25999 requirements with The Planning Portal's available functionality.

Key BCM Activity & Requirement	The Planning Portal's Contribution
Program Management
Steering Committee	N/a
Program Management & Oversight Personnel	Provides business continuity managers additional access to review and manage the Business Continuity Management (BCM) lifecycle Extensive reporting features based on SQL Reporting Services “At a glance” dashboard, providing an overall summary of the enterprise planning effort Granular security, auditing and versioning controls
Business Continuity Policy	Business Continuity Policy requirements can be integrated into the BCM process by customizing required fields
Review & Revision Process	Automates workflow for review and revision Assign one-time or recurring business continuity planning tasks to The Planning Portal users Submit BCM tasks to all plan owners at once or choose select personnel Run reports with an overview of all completed tasks
Document Management	Documents are available with any web connection and the right access Flexible folder-based file management system, which also enables the storage, versioning and linking of supporting files (of any type)
Analysis
Risk Assessment	Identify key threats and vulnerabilities, for individual processes and the overall facility (consistent with enterprise risk management, or ERM, best practices) Self assessment for individual facilities to evaluate themselves against corporate or international standards
Business Impact Analysis	Support for a survey and/or interview-based analytic approach Identify critical processes across the entire enterprise Depict the impact of process interruptions over time Identify key process and application dependencies Utilize information gathered during the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) in all subsequent phases
Identify Business Requirements for Mitigation & Recovery	Frameworks enable business-focused development and prioritization of risk treatment options Identify minimum resource requirements for items such facilities, technologies and communications – by process, facility and across the enterprise
Strategy Design
Risk Treatment Efforts Response Efforts IT Recovery Options Manual Workarounds	Documents analysis and provides summary information for strategy decision-making and selection
Business Process Recovery Approach	Conduct alternate space planning – to define which alternate facilities will be used by each process in the event of a business interruption
Plan Documentation
Incident Management	Identify minimum staffing levels by process, across the period of disruption
Crisis Communications (Internal & External)	Develop crisis communications plans Identify communications roles Manage internal and external contacts through the use of interfaces with other business applications, to include human resource systems, ERP applications or even Active Directory
Business Process Recovery & Manual Procedures	Develop recovery plans based on one or more scenarios, such as loss of facility, loss of personnel or loss of technology
IT Recovery	Develop IT recovery plans, based on recovery objectives identified during the business impact analysis
Training & Exercising
Key Participant Awareness	Complete web-based e-learning solution management framework Assign training modules to ‘learners’, require learners to complete quizzes and review overall results by facility or across the enterprise
General Employee Awareness & Training	Viewable by all employees with customized user access for general population access Learning Management System-based training capabilities Measure learning and report awareness levels enterprise-wide Provides instructional content on your business continuity management system, as well as details on how to use The Planning Portal
Plan Exercises	Define exercise plans and objectives Track exercises across the enterprise
Continuous Improvement	Evaluate exercise results versus objectives

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View The Planning Portal Product Sheet for more information regarding key features of this unique solution and to further explore the value The Planning Portal will provide your organization!