Vasant Balasubramanian Vice President of Product Management MetricStream, Inc.

MetricStream, a market leader in Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) solutions has announced the release of its enhanced Business Continuity Management (BCM) solution that integrates with IT GRC, risk management, supply chain management, and incident response frameworks.

The enhanced solution will help companies align their BCM processes with ISO 22301 standards and strategic objectives within the larger context of the enterprise GRC framework, extending into customer and supplier eco-systems. The solution will also provide real-time situational awareness via social media and feeds from authoritative sources such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Companies can improve preparedness for disaster recovery by leveraging the mobile application capabilities supported by MetricStream GRC Platform.

Increasing occurrences of natural disasters, cyber-attacks, and terrorist threats have propelled BCM and disaster recovery preparedness to the top of every organization's agenda. In today's technology-reliant world, it is more important than ever that companies proactively protect themselves against the potential loss of revenue, customer relationships, and corporate reputation by implementing robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

MetricStream helps customers worldwide strengthen their end-to-end BCM processes, and the enhanced BCM solution boasts a range of new capabilities, including:

• Real-time situational awareness: The MetricStream solution connects to government sources and agencies such as FEMA and the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to provide disaster and emergency alerts, weather feeds, power availability notifications, and data on cyber-security incidents and homeland security. The solution also tracks social media platforms such as Google Crisis Maps, Twitter, and Facebook for crisis updates. This information is then correlated with organizational assets and risks to determine the impact of a crisis. Accordingly, incident management workflows can be triggered though the solution, and tracked in real time via powerful dashboards and reports.
• BCM on the mobile platform: With pervasive mobility and the acceptance of BYOD across organizations, more and more people are using phones and tablets for official purposes. The widespread usage of mobile devices and the fact that they enable faster and instant communication at any point of time has prompted MetricStream to include mobile functionalities in its BCM solution. The solution leverages the mobile application capabilities supported by MetricStream GRC Platform to enable BCM related information, plans, and alerts to be communicated and made available over mobile devices via SMS and other channels. This helps ensure timely response and action in an emergency as a part of the crisis or incident management process.
• Support for ISO 22301 standards: The MetricStream solution offers a pre-built and configurable BCM content library based on ISO 22301 standards, which helps companies build policies, processes, controls, reporting templates, and eLearning modules that fully conform to these standards. Organizations can also efficiently migrate from the older BS 25999 standard to the newer ISO 22301 standard.
• Integration with GRC and strategic decision-making processes: The MetricStream solution helps integrate BCM processes with other enterprise GRC processes, including Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), compliance management, issue management, and supply chain governance. Instead of a BCM program operating in silo, it is integrated with the broader GRC and ERM programs, which strengthens collaboration, re-use of data, and sharing of strategic information across business functions. This enables advanced risk intelligence to be gathered from across the enterprise to help the management team make the right business decisions.

"Even as technology amplifies the impact of a crisis on the business, it also revolutionizes the way companies can respond to a crisis and communicate with their stakeholders," said Vasant Balasubramanian, Vice President of Product Management at MetricStream. "The latest enhancements to the MetricStream BCM Solution harness the power of social media and mobility to strengthen crisis management and crisis response efforts. The solution also helps protect stakeholder interests by aligning business continuity plans with enterprise risks and strategic decisions. At a broader level, the solution provides a centralized point of reference to manage the entire range of BCM processes across the extended customer and supplier eco-system, ultimately to enable efficient and effective business continuity, disaster recovery, and crisis management." 

MetricStream is a market leader in Enterprise-wide Governance, Risk, Compliance (GRC) and Quality Management Solutions for global corporations. MetricStream solutions are used by leading corporations such as UBS, P&G, Constellation Energy, Pfizer, Philips, BAE Systems, Twitter, SanDisk, Cummins and Sonic Automotive in diverse industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Energy and Utilities, Food, Retail, CPG, Government, Hi-tech and Manufacturing to manage their risk management programs, quality processes, regulatory and industry-mandated compliance and corporate governance initiatives, as well as several million compliance professionals worldwide via the www.ComplianceOnline.com portal. MetricStream is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.