It is commonly the case that Business Continuity is on the agenda due to external regulatory or audit requirements and this provides sufficient impetus for a Business Continuity Implementation. With or without these external pressures, a business case for the cost of implementing and maintaining business continuity will need to be created. Below are some…
A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) allows an organisation to identify the criticality of processes, interdependencies with other business units and third party suppliers, critical system requirements (e.g. systems and applications), vital files, network drives and hardware, describe manual work arounds and prioritise business functions during a recovery situation. The BIA forms the basis for the…
Many organisations have business continuity plans designed to cater for major catastrophes but often don’t consider some of the less dramatic but more common causes of business interruption such as extended power or IT failures. Consider whether your BCP has the flexibility to respond to the wide variety of incidents that may occur.
A workaround is an alternative process used to replace the normal ‘business-as-usual’ process or IT system which may be unavailable during business disruption. When determining the Maximum Tolerable Outage (MTO) for a business function, whether or not there are manual, paper-based workarounds is a factor that can help work out how long you can afford…
If an organization experiences a ‘denial of access’ or ‘loss of premises’ due to incidents such as extended power outage, flood or fire, an alternate location for critical business processes and staff needs to be established. An Alternate Site is the premises to which a business unit may transfer its operations in the event of…
This is a debatable point but possibly acting upon an outdated strategy will be time, money and energy misspent in recovering something that is incorrect or no longer needed. Change is inevitable … A plan can easily get out of date as staff turnover, new business units are created or decommissioned, IT systems are changed,…