Of course, what we really mean is rightsizing the services a business continuity consultant can provide. How much or how little an organisation decides to involve an external consultant will depend on the extent of business continuity planning needs, and how that organisation is set up to handle them. Ideally, you’ll leverage the involvement of a business continuity consultant to get the most benefit for the least outlay, keeping the decision-making process flexible according to needs and resources. However, there’s one situation where you’ll often get more “bang for your buck” by bringing in a consultant.
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Posts Tagged ‘BCP’
Rightsizing Your Business Continuity Consultant
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012Business Continuity – SunGard User Group Forum 2011
Friday, March 25th, 2011The 2011 Business Continuity User Group Forum was recently announced and this short video production has just been released in which Tracey Forbes gives an overview of the keynote speaker and format for the user forum event.
Click here to view it now.
CIOs warned to prioritise governance and business continuity
Thursday, March 24th, 2011Recent natural disasters have spurred warnings to forgo a reactive approach to governance.
In this Computerworld article, HopgoodGanim’s IT lawyers are reminded of the importance of prioritising ICT governance and business continuity to minimise risk to the business, in the wake of the recent natural disasters plaguing the nation and indeed the world.
Business Interruption – Water pipe burst evacuates 3500 from Sydney’s AMP Tower
Friday, February 25th, 2011A real life example of a business interruption incident today. A burst water pipe in the AMP Building in Sydney caused 3500 staff to be evacuated.
For the businesses without water damage, hopefully access can be restored and everyone is back to work on Monday morning. If any businesses sustained significant damage to their floor, it may be a while longer. This is an example of when having an alternate recovery site location ready to invoke may be necessary.
Read more on Sydney Morning Herald news.. http://t.co/DxhLGrO
Business Continuity Planning – More Than Just Disaster Recovery
Monday, February 14th, 2011The 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.
Embedding Business Continuity Management into your organisation’s culture
Thursday, November 25th, 2010Your business continuity and IT disaster recovery plans are living documents that need to continually evolve otherwise they will stagnate. If you maintain and exercise your plan it will evolve along with your organisation, helping you to be prepared should a business interruption strike.
Here are OpsCentre’s top 5 tips on how to keep the Business Continuity Plan alive in your organisation.
- Business Continuity needs a senior sponsor that has the authority and influence to establish the priority of BCP for the organisation. Get BCP on the agenda for Road Shows and Strategic Planning sessions that the Executive presents.
- Ensure that impacts upon Business Continuity Strategy are considered when assessing the business case for all new projects. Not just IT projects but business ones as well such as implementing new products, services or business locations. Ensure that any changes required to the business continuity strategy, for example extra seats at a recovery site, are included when you cost out the new project. You can also include reviewing the BIA and updating the recovery procedures for the affected business units as activities in the project. Update your business case templates and change request templates to prompt for these considerations up front.
- Include a BCP awareness package in the induction training for all new staff.
- Include business continuity ‘roles’ in position descriptions, workplans and KPI’s.
- Exercise and Test your plan every year at a minimum. Testing is not a pass or fail exercise, it helps to refine your plan and provides an excellent opportunity for staff to gain familiarity with their business continuity roles and the continuity strategies. It doesn’t have to be boring, business continuity can be an interesting, fun, team building event.
Don’t have time for Business Continuity Management? Then why not outsource it!
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010Ensuring 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.
Business Continuity Best Practice Strategies – YouTube Video
Saturday, May 15th, 2010OpsCentre’s YouTube channel features Rod Crowder, Managing Director, discussing key Business Continuity Planning issues and best practice strategies.
Business Continuity Planning for Small to Medium Enterprise
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010Consider 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.
OpsCentre offers complimentary Business Continuity Consultation
Monday, February 8th, 2010OpsCentre is pleased to announce the launch of our COMPLIMENTARY Business Continuity Consultation offer. For a limited time we are providing a complimentary consultation, to Australian Businesses valued at $495.
The Business Continuity Consultation assesses the effectiveness of your organisation’s Business Continuity Program. If you don’t have one in place, the assessment will identify the level of exposure and the critical elements required to ensure your organisation can recover effectively from a major incident.
For more information click on this link… Business Continuity Consultation
Or contact us now on 1300-bc-plan to book in your complimentary consultation.
Business Continuity Terminology – What’s the difference between MTO, RTO and RPO?
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010A common query that we come across in business continuity consulting is, ‘what is the difference between MTO, RTO and RPO?’
MTO is the Maximum Tolerable Outage
The Maximum Tolerable Outage for a critical business process represents the maximum amount of time that an organization can survive without the business process in any form (manual or automated). Defining the MTO for a process gives you the deadline for when this process must be up and running in some form or another.
The BCI describes MTO as ‘At what point in time do you need to either recover your business process, or invoke contingency procedures to prevent you from meeting your business objectives\targets.’
RTO is Recovery Time Objective
Recovery Time Objective is essentially the timeframe requirement for how long it should take to recover from the time of declaring the disaster (not the time of the actual incident) to when the critical process or system is available to users.
RPO is the Recovery Point Objective
The Recovery Point Objective describes the age of the data you want to restore in the event of a disaster. For example if your RPO is 6 hours, you want to restore systems back to the state they were in no longer than 6 hours ago. This dictates your backup requirements, in this example you must be making data backups at least every 6 hours. Any data created up to the 6 hour RPO will be lost and will need to be recreated during your recovery process (if possible).
What is the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity planning?
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009Persons new to recovery planning often find it difficult to differentiate between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. In its simplest form, Business Continuity differs from Disaster Recovery in that its focus is on people and the continuation of business processes and objectives rather than the availability of IT systems and infrastructure.
Business Continuity Planning deals with taking pro-active measures to ensure continuity of business as well as plans to manage the response and recovery from a business interruption. The Business Continuity Plan would include a plan for the Command Team who will co-ordinate and oversee the response as well as sub-plans for the business units.
The IT Disaster Recovery Plan supports the recovery effort by detailing the IT system recovery priorities and time constraints, plans and strategies for recovery as well as detailed restoration procedures. The priorities and time constraints need to be driven from the business continuity requirements identified in the business impact analysis.
Of vital importance is getting Business Continuity Plans and IT Disaster Recovery Plans to dovetail in and work together to support one another in a recovery effort.
Need help integrating the pieces of the puzzle? Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Consulting
Business Impact Analysis
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009A 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 Business Continuity Plans.
A business impact analysis should take into account tangible financial impacts (opportunity cost, increased cost of working expenses, revenue reduction, uninsured asset replacement, capital value and financial viability) as well as intangible, non-financial impacts (reputation, brand and presence, legal and contractual liabilities, quality of product and services, stakeholder confidence and support, staff morale and well being, operational and management control and environmental damage).
A clear understanding of these impacts will help form the justification for the level of business continuity\IT disaster recovery investment required.
Business Continuity Testing Isn’t a Pass or Fail Exercise
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) need to be regularly tested and updated to ensure accuracy and effective recovery in the event of a disruption.
Testing (sometimes referred to as Exercising) shouldn’t be viewed as a Pass or Fail exercise as every test is an opportunity to find potential problems with your plan and to have an opportunity to rectify them.
We view testing as an opportunity to continually evolve not only the strategy and plan documents themselves but to build the competence of the key staff members involved. A regular BCP test will help to embed the skills required to effectively manage a business interruption.
Once you’ve mastered the basics of testing your business continuity plan, put your strategy to the test by seeing if it can hold up in a variety of circumstances. It also helps to engage the interest of the business continuity team members if the test scenarios are dynamic and evolving.
Some ideas on how to keep your testing fresh and continually improving are to try some different ‘incidents’ such as a catastrophic loss of premises, extended power failure resulting in denial of access to building or loss of significant staff due to a pandemic.
Other ways to put your plan through its paces is to throw in a complication such as the unavailability or loss of a key recovery staff member Eg. The IT Recovery Co-ordinator or the Command Team Leader. Other complications could include, mobile phone telecommunications being unavailable.
A robust business continuity plan and the business continuity team should be able to respond to these challenges.
Most importantly, to ensure you are getting value out of your testing process, ensure someone is assigned the responsibility for noting down issues and action items for rectification arising from the test and for following up to make sure they are completed.