SunGard Availability Services announced enhancements to PLANet, a web-based business continuity planning tool for community banks that helps ensure business continuity plans are constructed according to financial industry regulations and best practices.

The new capabilities are customer-driven enhancements that help financial organizations lower business risk and simplify regulatory compliance while also improving disaster preparedness.

New features include:

Vendor management enhancements. To better manage business partners in the vendor supply chain lifecycle, Vendor Management provides RFP-like checklists for organizations to perform an assessment at the beginning of the vendor relationship as well as an annual review. This capability can be particularly useful in working with IT vendors who have access to sensitive data and for whom security protocols must be in place. Financial institutions can also attach all vendor documentation to a single vendor record, helping simplify management.

Risk assessment enhancements. PLANet now provides fields within Risk Assessment to include notes of mitigation strategies that have been implemented. It also offers new reporting features that help organizations perform sorting—such as by probability or criticality of the impact—to determine which activities are more likely to happen and determine the potential impact of the risk.

Reporting enhancements. To help address regulatory audits and make it easier to sort data, PLANet includes several new reports to the Testing and Business Impact Analysis capabilities. For instance, testing reports include business continuity planning components, such as “most recent test” and “test by date,” to respond quickly to audit requests.

Other feature enhancements include rich text formatting for memo fields and user-administered password reset.

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