It's never too late to build a
business continuity plan
... until it's too late
OpsCentre will be hosting a Round Table on the 28th of April at the Vibe Hotel in Sydney; to register click here.
We will be discussing the risks associated with cloud computing with industry professionals.
To get you warmed up for the discussion have a look at this very informative clip posted by Macquarie Telecom discussing Cloud computing and the risks associated with off-site data storage.
Click here to watch the Macquarie Telecom Clip.
OpsCentre is hosting another Round Table event at the Vibe Hotel in Sydney on 28th April 2011 to discuss Cloud Computing Risks.
Details have been updated on OpsCentre’s Events page and there is a link through to more information and registration.
The disasters in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia have put BCP into sharp focus.
In this article, Allan Davies provides advice he gleaned the hard way from working through numerous disasters, and suggests that CIO’s need to think in broader terms than just IT disaster recovery. He outlines nine valuable lessons that should be incorporated into everyones disaster recovery plan.
Public cloud computing risks are numerous enough to field a top 10 — or even more. Professional organizations and CIOs are developing threat lists to help them come to grips with the public cloud, an entity that will continue to seep into the enterprise IT environment whether they like it or not.
SearchCIO has just published the following article: http://tinyurl4.info/top10risksinpubliccloud
Novell is hosting a complimentary Webinar on the Real Cost of Downtime on January 19, 2011 (or Thu, Jan 20, 2011 6:00 AM – 7:00 AM AEDT if you’re in Australia).
The main topics to be covered are:
- Traditional disaster recovery challenges, particularly when it comes to testing and recovery planning
- Best practices for reducing disruption and improving coordination and communication
- How virtualisation is a potential game changer in increasing the level of trust businesses have in disaster recovery plans
Register to participate here.
OpsCentre has updated the website with a new section on upcoming events that may be of interest to you. This event page will highlight upcoming industry events relevant to Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery and Risk.
You can find the new Events page here… OPSCENTRE EVENTS
Ensuring continuity of your business functions, processes and critical IT systems and applications, along with the decision making in a time of crisis cannot be completely outsourced; there will always be responsibilities owned by the board, executive team and operational staff members. However, a great deal of the co-ordination and maintenance can be outsourced for considerably less cost than hiring a full-time Business Continuity Manager. A commitment to ongoing maintenance of your business continuity plan not only ensures that it is current and usable, but also assists with meeting regulatory and audit obligations.
OpsCentre tailors a Business Continuity Managed Service to meet suit any level of requirements and budget and can include activities such as:
1. Conducting regular reviews and updates of all business continuity and IT disaster recovery documentation to ensure it is current
2. Ensuring ongoing IT and business change management and project implementations consider Business Continuity implications and that the plans and strategy are kept in alignment with an evolving organisation.
3. Co-ordinating periodic refreshes of the business impact analysis and risk assessments
4. Scheduling regular desktop exercises and live tests of the business continuity plan
5. Providing induction training for new staff, maintaining training materials and training your trainers
6. Providing ongoing mentoring and training for key staff in their business continuity roles
7. Chairing a periodic Business Continuity Steering Committee and tracking progress of resulting action items.
8. Crisis support in the case of a business interruption incident
9. Providing co-ordination and facilitation assistance during actual disaster events or major incidents.
We cater to all levels of client needs: from basic quarterly maintenance tasks to 24×7 standby support; helping co-ordinate an incident response whenever it may happen day or night. Using our skilled and experienced team means you also gain access to the latest methodologies, industry research and continuity planning standards that we continually work with.
Talk with OpsCentre’s Director, Rod Crowder today to discuss your needs and we can build a business case to show how you can achieve more and save money compared to hiring an in-house resource.
Here is the link to OpsCentre’s video about Disaster Recovery on our YouTube Channel…
Consider the scenario of losing your primary premises due to fire. Can you answer these questions?
- How much revenue would you lose being out of action for a day, a week or a month?
- Have you got an alternate location to operate your business from?
- Is your data regularly sent off site and ready to be restored into backup systems?
- What are your critical paper records and how do you continue to operate if they were destroyed?
Every business, regardless of its size, should be confident in the answers to these questions and should be making an informed choice about the cost of implementing business continuity strategies and IT disaster recovery solutions versus the risk\cost of not doing anything.
Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) often don’t have the budget or resources to spend months implementing a business continuity project. But SME’s still have a need for BCP, just as much as bigger organisations. Quite often all of the physical resources, especially IT equipment are concentrated in the one location which can increase the risk. Sometimes without dedicated IT staff, the backup and restoration practices may not be sufficient to help them recover from a loss of premises type incident.
At OpsCentre we’ve refined the art of the ‘Quick Start’ BCP and can deliver a business continuity plan for suitable small to medium enterprises within 1-2 weeks. If your organization needs assistance with getting a business continuity plan in place we can help. Contact us and let us know what you need.
Do you know the answers to these questions for your organisation?
1. How would we continue to function in an extended building evacuation such as a power outage or flood in the basement?
2. Who are our most critical customers and how would we contact them?
3. What is our current IT Disaster Recovery capability? How long would it take to restore our most critical systems, applications and data?
4. Do we outsource critical business functions to third party organisations services? What if they were to fail.
5. Do our staff know how to get out of our building safely, where to go, and how do we account for them?
6. In the event of a disaster, would we need to implement manual workarounds to cater for reduced staff numbers, loss of IT systems, or denial of access to our building?
OpsCentre recommends undertaking a Readiness Assessment to identify where you are exposed and the possible impacts. If you would like assistance with evaluating the health of your business continuity program, we would be happy to assist. Don’t forget we are offering a complimentary initial consultation from which you will receive an ‘actionable’ health check report.
Click here for more information about the OpsCentre complimentary consultation.
Do you need to select an alternate recovery site for your business continuity or IT disaster recovery?
In the event of a disaster, it is crucial that your organisation can transition as smoothly as possible into a recovery site and commence working on critical business processes as quickly as possible. Ensuring that an appropriate alternate recovery site has been selected is key to this smooth transition.
OpsCentre has released a succinct 2 page guide to considerations for selecting the right recovery site.
The report covers aspect such as:
Go HERE to request your copy of the COMPLIMENTARY, OBLIGATION-FREE Alternate Site Selection Report.
Your organisation has changed and you are finding that the current “paper-based” planning methodology no longer is fit for purpose.
If you recognise any of the following items familiar, it may be time to invest in a business continuity software planning solution:
1. Are your plans hard to maintain and have numerous areas for updates?
2. Would the volume of updates and changes be better suited to the functionality of a relational database?
3. Does your organisation have numerous Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery stakeholders that are required to provide input and updates to the plans?
4. Is the import of your Business Impact Analysis (BIA) information a manual process taking significant time and effort to complete?
5. Is it difficult to provide granular reporting to Senior Management and auditors?
6. Is additional plan security required?
7. Are some sections of the plans “off limits” to certain groups or business units?
8. Is Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery exercising and training difficult to organise and complete?
9. Does your current plan require greater geographical coverage for your branch offices?
10. Are updates completed in a scheduled manner (or 1 week prior to an audit or test)?
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, odds are that a more sophisticated Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery planning tool may be of use to the maintenance and health of your management program.
The best part is that this is not a “throw the baby out with the bathwater” scenario. Some of the better planning tools allow for the import of completed planning data directly into the software tool, retaining all of your previously completed hard work .
Time spent evaluating a Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery software planning tool may benefit your constantly changing and evolving plans and be of great value to your organisation.
The linked article here by Richard Jones of Burton Group in the US whilst written in 2008 is worth revisiting because it describes some useful tips on how to get the right staff for Business Continuity Planning. The article describes what you need in an internal BCP leader and how to find the right BCP consulting firm.
To summarise, the top 5 tips for finding the right Business Continuity Planning Consultants are:
So how do we stack up? OpsCentre is confident that we can tick all of those boxes.
Point 5 is something we feel really passionate about. At OpsCentre we don’t want to leave you with a set of documentation that gathers dust on the shelf. We want to help embed business continuity into the organisational culture so that there is a continual improvement cycle and evolution towards maturity of business continuity within that organization.
Read the full article here.
1. The Senior Executive actively supports Business Continuity
The CEO\Director\General Manager that believes in and wants a functional Business Continuity program in place is a critical success factor.
To have a senior Executive that is responsible for setting the priorities and vision for the organisation to stand behind BCP and communicate this to the staff is a powerful change motivator.
2. A Whole of Business Approach
A business continuity program that prioritises the organisation from the Executive’s birdseye perspective as well as analysing business impacts across all business functions in a consistent manner will lead to a better informed business continuity strategy being proposed. It allows the Executive to see the requirements of the business in a single snapshot and make a cost benefit justified decision on the level of continuity required.
3. A Single Point of Business Continuity Management
Someone needs to be responsible for BCP at an organisational level. It needs to be in their job description and a priority for them, otherwise it runs the risk of falling between the cracks. With one person accountable for co-ordinating, aggregating, monitoring the overall Business Continuity program and reporting to the Executive, the program is more likely to stay visible and maintain momentum.
4. Testing, Testing, Testing
Business Continuity should be viewed as an ongoing continuous improvement program. And as such testing is vital. It highlights flaws and validates assumptions in your business continuity plans, giving opportunity to improve them. Testing builds confidence and competence within the business continuity team as it brings home how the strategy would actually work in a variety of scenarios and how the roles will interrelate. An untested Business Continuity Plan cannot be considered viable.
5. Embedding BCP into job descriptions and procedures
The various BCP roles such as BCP Manager, Command Team Leader, Business Unit Leader, etc should be written into position descriptions so that it is very clear that is a part of the responsibilities of the staff members. Procedures for new projects, business changes and IT changes should include provision for ensuring the change has BCP/ IT Disaster Recovery aspects taken into account. All changes should have an impact analysis conducted that includes impact on BCP/IT Disaster Recovery procedures.
6. Starting on the right foot
An induction training package that briefs new employees on the Business Continuity and Emergency Management strategies and plans in place is a great way to start them off on the right foot, highlighting the importance of this to the organisation.
7. Maintenance
The person responsible as BCP Manager should be tasked with ensuring maintenance of the documentation occurs on a regular basis. Outputs from changes and testing sessions all need to be fed into the plans. Periodically the BIA should be revisited and organisation’s prioritisations and maximum tolerable outages reviewed.
OpsCentre have compiled the following list of Au/NZ Business Continuity and IT Disaster Recovery related exhibitions, expos, conferences and other events.
Hope to see you there at one or more of the events.
| Feb | 23/02/2010 | Sydney | Continuity Forum | CF Experienced User Special Interest Group |
| Feb | 24/02/2010 | Wellington | Conferenz | 5th Annual Business Continuity Conference |
| March | 22/03/10 & 23/03/10 | Sydney | CEBIT | CEBIT – Future Proofing your data centre conference |
| March | 23/03/2010 | Sydney | Continuity Forum | Business Continuity Awareness Week Kick-off event |
| March | 24/03/10 & 25/03/10 | Sydney | BCI | Australasian Business Continuity Summit 2010 |
| March | 24-25 March 2010 | Sydney | Gartner | Gartner Infrastructure, Operation and Data Centre Summit |
| May | 5/05/2010 | NZ | Continuity Forum | New Zealand Conference |
| May | 19/05/10 -20/05/10 | Canberra | IQPC | Enterprise Risk Management for Government 2010 |
| May | 24 – 26 May 2010 | Sydney | CEBIT | CEBIT 2010 |
| Sep | 8/09/2010 | Sydney | Continuity Forum | Continuity Forum Conference and Expo |
| Nov | 10/11/2010 | Sydney | Continuity Forum | BC in Government Conference |
Further details canbe found on the websites of the respective companies organizing the events.