Comprehensive Professional Business Continuity Consulting Services to help you attain resilience, and save on subject matter staffing costs

Ascent’s Professional Business Continuity Management Consulting helps your organization attain resiliency by aligning your organization to meet ISO 22301 standards, and best practices by accredited institutions such as the Business Continuity Institute, and The Disaster Recovery Institute. In addition, our clients from organizations across the globe have trusted us to outsource their business continuity, risk, and crisis management programs to our subject matter experts in which our clients have acknowledged that our approach in building, delivering, and maintaining world-class business continuity programs is a must for any organization needing to do so. Our resiliency-management experts render consultancy in the following areas:

BCM Services Offerings :

  • BCM Policy and Governance Framework

  • Conducting Business Impact Analysis and Obtaining Sign-off

  • Organizing BCM Risk Analysis and Obtaining Sign-off

  • Developing a Recovery Strategy and its Sign-off Process

  • BCM Plan Review

  • Conducting BCM Tests and Exercises, including Exercise Report Preparation

  • Internal Audit of BCM

  • Third-party Audits (of Vendors) on behalf of Principals

  • Managed BCM Services and Specialized BCM Manpower Outsourcing

  • Maintenance and Assurance Audits

  • Running the BCM Management Review

  • Configuration and Implementation of BCM Tools

BCMS Implementation Consultancy:

Business Threats:

  • Understanding the need for a Business Continuity program
  • Life Cycle Overview
  • Identifying BCM Requirements
  • Assessment of Risk
  • Conducting Impact Analysis

Identifying Critical Operation Strategies for :

  • Mitigating Risk
  • Reducing Impact
  • Recovering Computer Systems
  • Resuming Business Operations

Developing plans for computer system recovery :

  • Evaluating Commercial Recovery Services
  • High Availability Systems

Developing plans for business resumption :

  • Initial Response and Assessment / Interim Contingencies
  • Resource Provisioning / Business Resumption
  • Return to Normal

Enabling your Business Continuity Program :

  • Overview of Business Continuity ‘best practices’
  • Setting up corporate policies, objectives, and budgets
  • Assigning accountability for the Business Continuity program
  • Establishing the Business Continuity teams
  • Implementing a Crisis Management framework

Business Threats :

  • Understanding the need for a Business Continuity program
  • Life Cycle Overview
  • Identifying BCM requirements
  • Assessment of Risk
  • Conducting Impact Analysis

Exercise your People and Test, Test, Test Your Plan :

  • Training and awareness programs
  • Testing and exercising Business Continuity Plans
  • Conducting a disaster simulation exercise

Validating and Maintaining Business Continuity Programs :

  • Maintaining & Administering Business Continuity plans
  • Auditing & Evaluating Business Continuity Plans
  • Maintaining Management Support & Commitment
  • BCP Best Practices for your Organization

Crisis Management Team

You can’t do anything as long as you believe that you are in crisis. With your “Can do” attitude, you can change things in your favour. All you need is the right guidance from the right source to cultivate that attitude. Stop worrying and gear up for Crisis Management through Ascent AutoBCM® NextGen Crisis Management Training Courses.

Our highly skilled business consultants are acknowledged for their excellence in helping you sharpen your resilience skills and strengthen your crisis management team.

BCP Checklist

How do Ascent’s Crisis Management Workshops Help Companies?

We prioritize crisis management workshops as a key component for imbibing a positive BCM culture in your organization. These workshops are realistic and tailored as per the requirements of the Crisis Management Team and BCM.

Our crisis communication workshops improve the communication strategy of key personnel and spokesperson. It assists responsible employees in making meaningful communication with the media.

We offer a desktop exercise to “road-test” your Crisis Management Plan(s). It ensures that your team and the plan perform flawlessly during any disruptive incident.

Desktop simulations conduct plan testing and offer valuable inputs to the following areas:

  • Clarity of logic of the plan content and suggested approach.
  • Team escalation, roles, responsibilities, and resource.
  • Availability of technical, logistical, and administrative resources.
  • Fast decision-making on proactive versus reactive strategy.
  • Assist in decision-making regarding engagement with media or other stakeholders.

75% of our workshops focus on crisis communication. Our consultants will train your spokespersons to handle reputation management, crisis communication, and reputational risk management efficaciously. We will focus on providing our perspective on

  • What should be the approach of a company spokesperson to highlight a breaking news story (about the crisis)
  • What media wants from a company spokesperson?
  • Success Tips
  • Media traps to avoid
  • The impact of social media on crisis management

Best Practices of Crisis Communication

We offer you guidance on setting your communication agenda, what kind of principles you should follow for maintaining better media relations, online and social media communication strategy, and the internal communication plan during a crisis. These best practices indeed enhance the effectiveness of your crisis communication plan, which includes:

  • Stakeholder communication plan
  • Media statement
  • Q&A document
  • Brief a spokesperson and
  • Press conference

Crisis management training keeps you aware of the core concepts of this subject. It helps you to get clarity on why crisis management is relevant for every employee of the organization. Through this kind of training, you will get to know what makes it so important for your organization. In our training, we cover:

  • What is a crisis?
  • Importance of responding professionally.
  • Impact of good and bad crisis management
  • Best practice for effective crisis management
  • Relevant crisis management case studies and video clips

This Crisis Management Training discusses :

  • Cyber crime
  • Resource issue (e.g. pandemic; industrial action)
  • Infrastructure failure (e.g. power failure, telecoms equipment failure, data center failure)

We recommend using different exercise formats in the workshop to build different skills set and knowledge :

  • Exercise the current crisis/incident management plan to assess its effectiveness in a real-life situation and identify areas that need revision/ improvement, if any
  • Rehearse the crisis management team to handle crisis pressure and build confidence in them so that they will be able to manage crisis events with competency.
  • Engage crisis management and BCM / risk management teams to rehearse their respective roles and sketch out which communication channels should be used at that time by the respective teams

Our crisis preparation drills and test case scenarios develop an effective crisis management plan. Teams are trained by the experts for responding appropriately and effectively at the time of crisis. They should have clarity about the principles, processes, checklists, and the resources of their organizations.

Don’t Wait! Get in touch with Us today for your crisis management requirements!

Ascent Consulting enables banks to meet ISO 22301 standards for all their BCM activities: The attributes of ISO 22301 include :

  • Context of the organization
  • Leadership
  • Planning
  • Support
  • Operation
  • Exercising & Testing
  • Performance Evaluation
  • Continuous Improvement

Certification Approach

Step 1. Discuss the need for ISO 22301

Step 2. Carry out a GAP Analysis or play the role of an internal auditor

Step 3. Work closely to prepare the organization for obtaining required certification

Step 4. Pre-audit Stage 1 or 2

Step 5. Post-certification and ongoing management of the BCMS