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Posts Tagged ‘Business Continuity Planning’
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Sunday, January 17th, 2010Are your service providers the weak link in your business continuity strategy?
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010Business functions, systems or processes to be outsourced locally or internationally should comply with the organisation’s Business Continuity Management Policy and Outsourcing Policy. It is the responsibility of business owners, in conjunction with the sourcing department, to conduct adequate due diligence on the business recovery capability of the outsourced partner, however the relevant Business Continuity Managers need to ensure that all operational aspects of the functions outsourced are captured and reflected in the contractual documents.
Are your outsourced service and other third party providers are considered in your business impact analysis and business continuity strategy?
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).
OpsCentre offers Recession Buster ‘Quick Start’ Business Continuity Planning
Thursday, December 31st, 2009This program is ideal for the small to medium enterprise. It is a fixed fee, fixed scope project that provides a complete solution in the fastest possible timeframe. It can usually be completed within a 1-2 week period.
We utilize our consulting experience and best-practice materials to adapt a business continuity strategy to suit your business.
We can offer these services for business continuity and also IT disaster recovery or pandemic planning.
More details in the service overview download section of our website. PDF’s available to download under Quick Start.
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
The Business Case for Business Continuity Management
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009It 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 benefits and justifications that can be examined when establishing a business case for implementing and maintaining a business continuity program:
- The cost of not doing anything. What is your organisation’s level of exposure to business interruption risks? These may include Hardware Failure, Human Error, Natural Disaster etc. Calculate the true cost of downtime should your business suffer an interruption and what the likely timeframe is for recovery in your present situation. Eg. Unproductive staff costs, loss of revenue, loss of critical data and equipment, damage to the organisation’s reputation and the opportunity for your competition to take market share.
- General organisational resilience due to being risk aware and implementing mitigating actions, leading to reduced downtime.
- The Business Impact Assessment (BIA) phase of a business continuity program can help to find areas of process inefficiency that can be addressed.
- Cost savings that may be possible through server rationalization using virtualization technology.
- Reduced customer churn if they are subject to less service interruptions.
- Enhanced market position. It can give you an edge over your competition if you can provide assurances of continuity and service.
- Audit or regulatory compliance. Less exposure to compliance problems.
- Avoidance of penalties or fines for non-compliance with deadlines eg. Payroll within a certain timeframe according to an award or providing services to your customers within the terms of a Service Level Agreement.
It is also critical when developing a business case for implementing and maintaining a business continuity program to include the up-front costs of implementation eg. Consulting, internal staff time, establishment of IT systems as well as recurring costs such as leasing of recovery seats, software licenses and internal staff time for ongoing maintenance of the plans and conducting testing.