Business continuity planning, encompassing disaster recovery, minimises the impact of an incident on an company by ensuring alternate processes are in place for key functional functions. Business continuity planning looks in order to preserve assets as well as an organisation’s ability to achieve its mission, retain acceptable levels of productivity, customer support, and ultimately to stay in business.
Can an organisation be not big enough for business continuity planning? Business continuity planning is not consigned to large companies; any provider of a products or services, whether it is financial, manufacturing, distribution or sales, is equally subjected to the effects of a disaster. Are you prepared if something goes wrong?
Surely a business continuity plan is not needed if adequate insurance is in place?
Quite simply insurance does not buy back lost business, it only provides money. If this is not received immediately it could adversely affect cash flow, subsequent profits and client goodwill. Research suggest that typically only 60% associated with actual losses are covered. Could your organisation survive the loss? Disaster does not just occur following an incident on the grand scale. A small incident, over a short period, impacting a vital process, could severely interrupt an organisation; for example, an incident from our area that requires evacuation of the premises for hours or even days. Computers still run, phones nevertheless work and infrastructure is actually unharmed but there is no use of any of it until the incident is resolved. Interruption threats come from multiple sources; some more likely than others. Premises may be substantially flooded, destroying servers, or an organisation may be the target of theft. A business continuity plan examines the likelihood of this happening and considers a response in accordance with the risk.
It is vital to determine what would be addressed first following an incident. Who would be contacted first? How would staff be notified? To do this you need to examine your organisation, its people, its critical processes and how they are dependent upon considerations such as IT and infrastructure support, inner dependencies and suppliers.
Incident containment as well as recovery solutions are numerous and varied. If a flood for example, prevented access to your premises, could client service levels continue uninterrupted? The chance of this happening would be greatly increased by your staff logging in at home until full recovery is achieved. Without plans such as this in place how can you convey that operational confidence to your customers?
There are many factors and facets of business continuity. It is important to be realistic and believe sensibly about how your company would cope with a disruptive incident. Business continuity is about mitigating the effect of this incident by minimising financial losses and safeguarding your organisation’s reputation.
The solutions are not just quick fixes but long-term considerations. It is possible to survive an incident, but not necessarily possible to recover from the long term impact.
Where do I start?
Business continuity concerns each and every organisation. Business systems must be resilient. If business continuity planning fails, the same is true that of an organisations clients. Not being able to access data, email messages, and premises, or even create a phone call all have the potential to break a business – and that is just the start. A second reason why business continuity is vital is that organisations expect IT support on demand. A business ought to commit to investment in failover systems within multiple locations, home operating and standby power generation on-site, this way directors can be confident that a robust set of business continuity contingencies will be presently there.
The following pages highlight a few key areas of IT business continuity that the organisation should consider. Business continuity is a huge region and this is by no means a definitive guide. What this section will hopefully perform is stimulate thoughts and additional questions about how you can implement cost-effective IT business continuity plans.
What options are there?
IT business continuity planning needs to address both the hardware and information contained within the system. This section highlights some of the ways you can build protection around your system. It is essential to ensure comprehensive planning is within place by using highly resilient servers, secondary power supplies, dual Internet connections, redundant storage and uninterruptable power supplies. As well as this it is recomended that businesses use thin client technologies, such as Citrix and Microsoft® Terminal Providers, for remote access, and virtual servers to provide each flexibility and resilience.
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