BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN

Business Continuity Plan

Business Continuity Plan

Introduction

Many organisations have catastrophe Recovery Plans. We prefer the term Business Continuity Plan because it includes not only major disasters (eg total loss of a building) but also routine interruptions to service (the computers are down for half an hour). It puts disaster planning in perspective and makes it more likely that disasters will be handled smoothly.

Objectives

The objectives of this plan are:

•To double-check that greatest possible service grades are maintained

•To double-check that we retrieve from interruptions as rapidly as possible

•To minimise the prospect and impact (risk) of interruptions

Principles

The values behind this plan are:

•catastrophe Recovery is just part of enterprise Continuity

•dangers are considered for both likelihood and business impact

•enterprise continuity plans should be sensible, functional and achievable

In other phrases, we are not designing for every possibility. Diminishing returns affect the benefits of planning for extreme cases.

Functions vs Causes

We have developed this plan by investigating what is being cut off, rather than why. For example, the Head Office building may be unavailable for many reasons - but in terms of its impact on the operations and services of the DMU, it matters not whether the cause is a contaminated aircon unit, a strike by security staff or a major traffic accident (or worse). Obviously the organisation will manage each incident differently, depending in some cases on the cause, but for our more specific purposes, the building is simply unavailable.

The many community-wide catastrophes, as well as singular disasters that companies, organisations, municipalities and government bureaus have suffered in the last dozen or so years, have shown us that planning for disaster recovery only is easily not enough. We should also design for enterprise resumption and enterprise continuity. We will not anticipate to retrieve completely and continue our business or services without designing for the recovery of the facility which houses the enterprise or service procedures and which provides the natural environment in which the enterprise flats and methods operate.

More often today it is the facility manager, risk manager, administrator, or director of security, or safety who are being asked to complete the plan - to address issues far beyond the recovery of the data centre or information services alone. These added issues furthermore directly sway the base line, including enterprise break and decrease of market share and stockholder confidence. They can encompass not only the personal recovery of the facility, but such critical catastrophe recovery and enterprise continuity issues as:

emergency response plan;

emergency notification procedures;

emergency relocation procedures;

emergency get access to control and security;

emergency acquisitions and authorization;

emergency command centre requirements;

hot site - cold/site - warm site requirements;

asset management and retrieval;

product and distribution recovery;

vital records recovery;

telecommunications recovery;

electronics recovery/restoration;

hazardous contamination;

environmental compliance;

Strohl Systems 1995. Reproduced with permission.

health and safety issues;

insurance loss documentation.

Where do you begin? No design is more important than that for human health and safety.

Singular and community-wide disasters

You should write your design so that your recovery procedures and methods can be swapped instantly from one catastrophe scenario to the other. For demonstration, the same resources on which you count to ...