Keep it going: Business continuity planning
A business continuity plan is as important as any insurance policy. You’ll obviously remember Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina: reminders that whilst disasters affecting businesses don’t happen every day, they happen.
Sandy is an interesting case study as it highlighted vulnerabilities of the electricity grid. It showed that even if your data center is secure, regional electricity outages can create disasters for businesses. It’s why a business continuity plan is a must.
The netlogx team has vast experience with organizational change management. This experience acts as the catalyst to develop and put in place your business continuity plan, which the team will do once your company is ready.
The creation process follows these stages:
Business Impact Analysis – establishes what’s critical and what’s not in your business’s processes and functions. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives are assigned.
Threat Risk Analysis – identifies the various risks that might affect your business.
Impact Scenarios – involve looking at the different effect of these risks. For example, how will a risk that has an impact on a data center be different to a risk with an impact on the corporate office?
Recovery Requirement – identifies the needs for recovery from each risk and makes sure they’re documented.
Solution Design – follows once each risk, impact and recovery requirement has been documented.
Implementation – of your business continuity plan. This includes, but is not limited to, a contract for a disaster recovery site and documented steps for dealing with threats that are educational for your members of staff.
Testing and Organizational Acceptance – of the plan. Depending on the threats and the solution, these typical testing methods may be table-top exercises or larger-scale simulations.
Maintenance – of the plan once it is in place. netlogx looks after the on-going awareness of the plan, any updates or any training related to it that’s needed for continued maintenance.
Why is business continuity planning so important?
It’s your insurance policy in the event of disaster. There’s no simpler explanation.
