The ROI of Business Continuity

Why ROI (Return on Investment)?

Business continuity professionals are often asked what the return on investment – or ROI – of business continuity really is. Is it worth the investment, both time and money?

If you have no business continuity plan in place when a disruptive incident occurs, but your biggest competitor responds to the incident effectively using their own business continuity plan, how will that impact your bottom line and customer base?

Business continuity is more than just a line item in your organization's budget. It's a lifeline for when – not if – an incident occurs, whether it's a natural disaster or cyberattack. A business continuity plan means that you will be able to maintain organizational resilience and continue operations, preventing a costly interruption that can damage your company's bottom line as well as its reputation.

Business continuity software and planning automates and streamlines the process, making reporting easy and saving your organization the time it usually takes to prepare a plan from scratch and collect and report on data.

Why Do We Need Business Continuity Software?

Drive Efficiency with Automation and Reporting

Without automation, one person may be required to chase down information, statuses, and updates. During an incident, different departments will try to access different resources, lengthening your downtime and costing you revenue if there isn’t a plan in place that automatically prioritizes resources.

Implementing BC software means you won’t have to spend hours collecting data for an exam or presentation; it’ll be at your fingertips. You can easily consolidate data and show ROI in both time and data collected to different stakeholders. Show which departments have completed tasks, outstanding tasks, and recovery time objective (RTO) timelines, and quickly and easily make tweaks in your plan that will be standard for all users.

Easily Maintain Accurate Data and Form an Effective Plan

You shouldn’t focus on gathering data. Instead, focus on analyzing and figuring out which products and services are highest priority to your business. Instead of focusing on making a plan, focus on creating an effective program.

Insights from Other Companies

Organizations around the globe are increasingly recognizing the need for business continuity planning:

• 84% have discussed the value of organizational resilience (PWC Global Crisis Survey 2021)
• 83% of organizations are performing longer-term trend analysis, and over half carry it out on a centralized basis (BSI Horizon Scan Report 2021)
• 21% of organizations have a business continuity management (BCM) budget of more than $1M (2021 BCM Trends Report)
• 25% of respondents anticipate hiring personnel dedicated to business continuity planning (BCP) in 2021, up from 14% in 2018 (2021 BCM Trends Report)

Prevent Downtime and Save Money

The average cost of an interruption could range anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Many businesses can't afford to recovery from such an incident; in fact, 40-60% of small businesses don't reopen following a disaster (FEMA, 2016).

Disruptions cost large companies $184M a year on average (Interos Annual Global Supply Chain Report 2021). Business continuity software and planning heavily mitigate the cost of an itnerruption. With BC planning in place, your organization will be able to maintain resilience and continue operations, rather than lose thousands of dollars during each minute of downtime (NAVEX Global 2021 Definitive Risk & Compliance Benchmark Report).

The cost of natural disasters is high, according to the Allianz Risk Barometer 2019:

• Fire or explosion: $5.8M
• Storm: $4.4M
• Earthquake: $1.6M
• Water damage: $0.6M

Data breaches, technology downtime, and supply chain disruptions add to the mounting costs of not maintaining continuity.

Tabletop Exercises

Even for an expert, creating a 50-slide tabletop exercise from scratch may take more than 20 hours – time better spent
on other pressing tasks.

Agility’s tabletop exercises take just two hours to run, saving you at least 18 hours – and you can choose from dozens
of scenarios.