Abriska 25999 - Case Study
Scottish Borders Council
On 18 November 2008 Scottish Borders Council (SBC) became the first local authority in the UK to achieve BS 25999 the new Standard for business continuity management (BCM). By achieving the Standard, SBC was required to demonstrate that it had robust plans in place to continue its essential operations in the event of any eventuality from a minor incident to a major disaster. One of the most impressive aspects of the certification was the sheer scale of the project i.e. the scope incorporated over 200 sites. In order to complete risk assessments across the authority SBC utilised Abriska 25999, a product developed by Ultima Risk Management (URM) specifically to address the risk assessment and business impact analysis requirements of BS 25999.
By adopting Abriska 25999, SBC was able to benefit from:
- Distributed risk assessment – Abriska allows individuals to be assigned specific risk assessment tasks then their input is captured via the secure web interface
- Consistent but customisable methodology – The workflow of Abriska allows a consistent methodology to be applied throughout the risk assessment. Features include; customisable likelihood and impact scales, justification to allow extra notes to be stored and the organisation’s risk appetite is applied throughout the risk assessment
- Full audit history – if any risk assessment result is changed, a history is kept of the original value, who changed it and when.
- Automated “Organisation” level reporting – if any risk is changed these will be automatically reflected in the organisation level report, no need to amalgamate hundreds of varying spreadsheets!
As Hugh Kinsella, Senior Risk Management Adviser at SBC adds “ The thought of not being able to use an automated and distributed risk assessment product like Abriska 25999 is difficult to imagine and would certainly have had an impact on the timescales involved. Abriska 25999 enabled me to effectively coordinate over 150 users and on the reporting of over 4000 risks.”
Scottish Borders Council BS 25999 certification press statement.
