The spread of COVID-19 forced nearly all enterprises to revisit their business continuity plans. This reassessment often revealed significant gaps—including failure to factor in the potential need for an entirely remote workforce and to consider impacts to supply chain. A new white paper from ISACA, Supply Chain Resilience and Continuity: Closing Gaps Exposed in a Global Pandemic, offers approaches that enterprises can implement to increase the resiliency of their own supply chain—during the current pandemic and potential similar future crises.
Supply Chain Resilience and Continuity walks enterprises through the best practices for supply chain management, supply chain risk, risk mitigation, continuity consideration to achieve increased resiliency—including contingency planning during pandemics—and human resources and continuity. In addition to addressing how to manage possible gaps in continuity planning, the white paper explores how to extend the supply chain concept to other functional business areas, and the concepts enterprises should apply when assessing the threats for a typical business continuity plan.
The paper outlines key steps that need to be addressed in the business continuity planning process, such as:
- Identify and assess risk associated with continued service from suppliers and third parties for providing services to customers.
- Establish communication to share information about preparedness and response plans with niche and tactical suppliers and service providers to improve transparency of responses.
- Limit geographical concentration and the single point of failure, following an accurate impact analysis.
- Extend simulation models to the various scenarios presented, including pandemic, to enhance the abilities of the business continuity plan.
“The current global health crisis has been a wake-up call to many enterprises as to how essential business resiliency and continuity planning is for their survival, and just how critical it is to build in considerations around supply chain into that plan,” says Brennan P. Baybeck, Immediate Past Board Chair of ISACA. “While events like the pandemic cause considerable challenges to all aspects of the supply chain, with careful planning, enterprises can control and limit the extent of the impact.”
Supply Chain Resilience and Continuity walks through important aspects of a crisis like a pandemic to consider, including impact—on the enterprise at geography level, on the supply chain, and on customers—and risk, including interruptions caused by possible lockdown and curfews by authorities to contain the pandemic and interruptions in communication services impacting availability of information for planning.
To access the white paper, visit: https://www.isaca.org/bookstore/bookstore-wht_papers-digital/whpbsc. Additional resources around COVID-19, including ISACA’s COVID-19 Study, can be found at www.isaca.org/go/covid19.
By: ISACA
Published on: 22 June 2020
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