Continuity assured with Phoenix’s complete BC Managed Solution

Phoenix, the leading UK IT & work area recovery provider, is cutting through the costs and complexity which have traditionally been associated with comprehensive business continuity planning, with a complete managed outsourced service, designed to help organisations create and maintain a much more resilient business.

Effective business continuity management (BCM) is an essential requirement for any organisations but is often seen as a complex, costly and time-consuming process to maintain. So much so that research by Phoenix suggests that less than 40 per cent of organisations are testing and updating their plans annually.

In order to address the inhibitors, which exist around firms managing the entire business continuity process, Phoenix has developed a complete end-to-end managed service designed to meet any requirements across the entire business continuity process from business impact analysis (BIA) and plan creation to annual rehearsals and plan maintenance.

Under the umbrella of a fixed price package, organisations looking to outsource their entire business continuity process have access to a combination of one-on-one consultation, specialist planning software tools, as well as the option of a complete managed service that allows any organisation to meet the requirements of company-wide BCM, IT disaster recovery and work-area recovery.

The package consists of three core elements – users will have access to BC practitioners and consultants who can offer advice and support for all stages of the business continuity planning process from those looking to design and implement their first plan, to those looking to seek council in light of an emergency or as part of a crisis response.

In addition to this, customers will also have access to Phoenix’s award-winning BCM software, Shadow-Planner. This easy-to-access, cost-effective Software-as-a-Service tool drives efficiencies and cost savings across the entire BCM process through a flexible, scalable and multilingual solution which supports the development and running of the most effective BC plans.

Finally, Phoenix’s expertise as a managed service provider, means users no longer need to maintain a costly and complex in-house team and can in fact outsource the entire process to Phoenix, providing an all-encompassing business continuity solution.

Paul Gant, head of BC Managed Solutions at Phoenix, states that the move by Phoenix to offer a complete BC outsourced solution, was an opportunity to provide customers with an end-to-end offering that removed the tradition pain-points, which existed around business continuity planning:
“Many organisations ‘sleep walk’ in terms of their BCM arrangements, often settling for the minimum and failing to update their plans.
“Moreover, BCM is seldom seen as a business priority, with responsibility for BCM often passed from person to person as an unwanted project, or is inherited by the IT department who often don’t have the risk and crisis management skills required.

“Our BCM solution aims to remove the pain and complexity from this entire process by offering organisations access to a quality controlled, flexible and cost-effective solution that provides users with a one-stop shop for all their business continuity needs. Our offering therefore allows firms to continue to own and manage their risk policies whilst capitalising on Phoenix’s breadth, depth, scale and expertise to ‘industrialise’ the processes required for end-to-end managed business continuity that ensures firms are always ready to respond with an up to date plan that has been tested on a regular basis.”