An integrated response to crisis
As the world becomes more complex and connected, the threat of a corporate crisis grows. Regardless of the initial cause, a crisis has the potential to inflict devastating harm, impacting everything from organisational operations to financial stability and the health and safety of your teams. We support our clients through challenging situations when facing a crisis and also understand that the impacts of a crisis can be felt months and even years after it has happened.
Organizations unprepared to manage the consequences of a crisis stand to suffer great financial, operational, and reputational loss. The impacts of incorrectly managing a crisis situation can potentially be more damaging than the actual crisis event.
We work with you to ensure that your organisation emerges from a crisis with greater strength and resilience. In particular, we support you in understand business risks, optimising your organisation’s processes and developing and exercising plans so that you can spot future challenges at an early stage and address them effectively.
Prepare
The more prepared an organisation is to manage a crisis, the more confidently it can fend off threats during a business disruption. PwC can support you with numerous measures to ensure you have all the tools you need in a crisis – from developing plans and holding training exercises to creating an integrated crisis and resilience management program.
Respond
For an effective crisis response, you need to take control, quickly and confidently. Business disruptions result in high pressure and emotions, losing sight of the bigger picture can have significant people, reputational and financial impacts on your organisation. We work alongside you, bringing business insight and an objective holistic view to help you better respond, prioritise and tackle the crisis head on.
Emerge stronger
When you reach a point of business continuity in your crisis lifecycle, often organisations move on to the next priority. However, most successful organisations are those that invested in continuous improvement mechanisms - learning lessons, implementing changes, and leveraging opportunities. Your recovery from a crisis can become an opportunity for new growth.
How PwC can help
- Enterprise Resilience
- Crisis Management
- Business Continuity
- Incident Response
Enterprise Resilience
Often when a crisis hits, an organisation’s response is disjointed. Resilience competencies and teams, structured in silos that have been developed over many years, are not aligned. So when a significant event occurs, the teams, methods, and technologies aren’t able to function smoothly – and often create more challenges than solutions.
Disruption is inevitable. What matters is an organisation's ability to emerge stronger from crisis, fueled by an enterprise-wide foundation of business resilience. We measure that ability in four fundamental pillars:
- Technology and operational resilience: Sustain core business functions and the availability of key technology
- Financial resilience: Withstand financial shocks to liquidity and assets
- Data resilience: Secure the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of critical data
- Workforce resilience: Maintain an available and productive workforce
A mature organisation is able to maintain a state of informed preparedness, continue essential mission critical functions despite a disruption or outage, execute response procedures to the extent possible during a disruption, and leverage knowledge from previous disruptions to enhance business resilience processes.
To help your organisation get there, PwC's approach involves a holistic strategy that applies several core resilience competencies:
- Business Continuity
- Disaster Recovery
- Incident Management
- Physical Security
- Emergency Response
Crisis Management
Every crisis brings its own complexities, affecting different parts of your organisation in varying ways. By designing, communicating and practicing an integrated, enterprise-wide crisis management program, you’ll be prepared to navigate those nuances with confidence when a disruption hits.
As you design or refine your crisis management program, engaging appropriate areas of expertise across your organisation will yield an effective and unified preparedness posture.
Working together with PwC professionals, you can design or improve various elements of your crisis management program depending on your aspired level of maturity, including:
- Program strategy and governance model
- Severity matrix and escalation triggers
- Crisis management team structure
- Response strategies and plans
- Roadmap and implementation schedule
- Program maintenance plan
- Exercising and testing with different scenarios
Business Continuity
Can your organisation sustain operations in the midst of a serious crisis? How do you identify “mission-critical” processes? Do you have a backup strategy in the event of a massive disruption in your technology, facilities or other functions? Are your employees trained to respond during business disruptions?
Companies that take a holistic approach to business continuity management develop the ability to identify, prevent and prepare for events that may disrupt normal activities. A fully integrated business continuity strategy helps to build an overall culture of resilience.
- We’ve built scalable solutions to create a bespoke solution for each of our clients:
- Business continuity program assessment and design
- Business impact analysis and interruption risk assessment
- Recovery plan creation and resilience improvement
- Business continuity program exercises, maintenance and training
- Business continuity program technology enablement and enterprise risk management integration
- Third-party resilience framework and analysis
- Information technology disaster recovery and business continuity program alignment and analysis
Incident Response
Cyber security incidents are firmly on the agenda, not just for boards, but for regulators, customers, and investors too.
The scale and sophistication of these incidents is increasing every year, and keeping pace with evolving attacker tools, techniques and procedures can feel like an impossible task.
Our incident response retainer services will provide you with this confidence, and allow for rapid and on-demand access to a pool of highly skilled and experienced incident response professionals around the world, as well as a range of adjacent PwC services designed to support you in a crisis.
We ensure that our team in the Netherlands maintains currency with your people, processes and technology meaning that should you require our assistance we can deploy with the minimum time and cost overhead. Our retainers provide global, on-demand, 24x7x365 access to a specialist cyber incident response team in the event of a cyber incident.
Key benefits include:
- A rapid and effective response to reduce the impact of an incident, with no need to onboard a provider whilst under duress, which could delay your response.
- Preparation of relevant plans, documentation and a maturity roadmap for IR maturity.
- Customisable service agreements to suit your specific business requirements.
- Availability of relevant reporting and data to demonstrate compliance to stakeholders and regulators.
- Detailed and effective breach notification support, in alignment with the GDPR.
- Access to a wide-range of cyber security, forensic, business advisory and legal experts – all of whom are experienced in working closely together in times of crisis.
Build resilience for your long-term success
Now, more than ever before, key stakeholders demand to have the confidence in not only the continuity and recovery, but also the ongoing improvement of an organization's critical business processes and activities should a disruptive event occur. Being resilient as an organization means that you are able to maintain business continuity, protect you reputation and make sure the impact on customers and employees is minimal, all whole dealing with uncertainty and extensive changes.
The main focus of our approach is to help you understand strengths and build the maturity of your crisis management and enterprise resilience to help you evolve capabilities to protect and sustain your core business functions and people. We take a risk-based approach to understand the opportunities and threats you are facing based on the risk landscape in which you operate. This provides the grounds for an agile and risk-sized program to support a systematic crisis management response especially tailored to your organization.
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