Business continuity planning, encompassing catastrophe recovery, minimises the impact of an incident on an organisation 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, keep 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 service or product, whether it is financial, manufacturing, submission or sales, is equally exposed to the effects of a disaster. Are you prepared if something goes wrong?
Surely a business continuity plan is unnecessary if adequate insurance is in place?
Quite simply insurance does not purchase back lost business, it only provides money. If this isn’t received immediately it could negatively affect cash flow, subsequent earnings and client goodwill. Research suggest that typically only 60% of actual losses are covered. Could your organisation endure the loss? Disaster does not simply occur following an incident on the grand scale. A small incident, over a short period, impacting a key process, could severely interrupt an organisation; for example, an incident from our area that requires evacuation of the premises for hours or even days. Computer systems still run, phones nevertheless work and infrastructure is 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 victim 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 very 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 as well as varied. If a flood for example, prevented access to your property, could client service levels continue uninterrupted? The chance of this happening would be greatly elevated by your staff logging in at home until full recovery is achieved. Without plans such as this in place how can you convey a level of operational confidence to your clients?
There are many factors and facets of business continuity. It is important to be realistic and believe sensibly about how your organisation would cope with a troublesome incident. Business continuity is about mitigating the impact of this incident by reducing financial losses and protecting your organisation’s reputation.
The solutions are not just quick fixes however 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 company. Business systems must be tough. If business continuity planning fails, so does that of an organisations customers. Not being able to access data, email messages, and premises, or even make a phone call all have the potential to break a business – and that is only the start. A second reason why business continuity is essential is that organisations expect This support on demand. A business ought to commit to investment in failover systems within multiple locations, home working and standby power era on-site, this way directors can be confident that a robust set of business continuity contingencies will be presently there.
The following pages highlight some 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 do is stimulate thoughts and additional questions about how you can implement cost-effective This business continuity plans.
What options are presently there?
IT business continuity planning needs to deal with 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 in place by using highly tough servers, secondary power supplies, dual Internet connections, redundant storage space and uninterruptable power supplies. In addition to this it is recomended that businesses use thin client systems, such as Citrix and Microsoft® Terminal Services, for remote access, as well as virtual servers to provide both flexibility and resilience.
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