Business continuity has evolved over the years, being influenced by a mixture of related components including disaster recovery (DR), contingency planning, crisis, risk and emergency management. In organisations today, it fulfils the basic need of allowing an organisation to continue their critical business processes, core services and objectives by identifying critical resources and putting contingency plans in place to continue business delivery if any of those critical resources happen to fail or be lost.

Australian organisations have recently been confronted with new business continuity challenges due to increased regulatory pressures and the possibility of having to handle unknown threats such as pandemic influenza, and climate change and internal system failures. These threats have elevated the importance of continuity within the business and have encouraged organisations to place increased emphasis on designing, implementing and maintaining effective business continuity processes.

This conference will allow you to hear practical case studies from exemplar organisations to provide you with the opportunity to understand how others have tackled BCM within their organisations. The following critical issues will be explored:

• Aligning BCM with your organisational strategy
• Developing a BCP and identifying the role of emergency services
• Differentiating BCM, disaster recovery (DR), crisis, and risk management
• Examining BC standards and guidelines
• Developing an appropriate response: tackling topical threats
• Recognising business resilience as an emerging field for BCM