BUSINESS CONTINUITY

Anil.C.VMeenu.S.BabuRajesh Kumar

Sunil.G.K

What is Business Continuity ?

Business contingency is the practice of formally preparing for variations in the business environment.

These variations can be of any kind, but the primary aim of business contingency planning is to ensure the survival of an organization by preparing for, reacting to, and adjusting to those variations.

Business continuity(BC) refers to the ability of a business to maintain continuous operations in the face of disaster

Continuous availability of IT

continuous availability to be ensured since organisations have become dependent on technology and if information technology (IT) resources suddenly become unavailable, all supporting business processes of that organization generally cannot continue, and this threatens the survival of an organization

What can disrupt your business ?

Fire Flood Terrorism

Hackers Power Network Troubles

Success, recovery or failure?

Time

Level

of

bu

sin

ess

Critical

recovery point

B

No BCM – lucky

escape

C No BCM –

usual outcome

A

Fully tested

effective BCM

THE BUSINESS CONTINUITY MANAGEMENT CYCLE

2

P

1

5

4 3

Understanding

Your Business

Business

Continuity Managem Strategies

Develop and

Implement BCM

Plans & Solution(s)

Building &

Embedding a

BCM Culture

Exercising,

Maintenance

and Audit

B C M

Programme

Management

Building Business Continuity Plan

form a core team from all segments of the business or organization

review all of the existing BC plans (if available).

understand the benefits of developing a BCP policy statement

Establish Project Objectives and Deliverables

Step 1. Project Initiation

Identify customer and business requirements

Identify external dependencies (i.e., government, industry, and legal)

Perform a business risk assessment

Obtain management support

Implement project planning and control process

Step 2. Business Impact Analysis

Define criticality criteria

Identify vital business processes, applications, data, equipment, etc.

Determine impact on business processes

Identify interdependencies

Define recovery time objectives

Step 3. Recovery Strategies

Identify process and processing alternatives and offsite data backup alternatives

Identify communications backup alternatives

Identify recovery strategy alternatives (replace, outsource, manual, etc.)

Formulate strategy based on optimum cost-benefit and risk

Review strategy with recovery teams, management, and customers

Step 4. Plan Development

Define disaster recovery teams, authority, roles, and responsibilities

Develop notification and plan activation procedures

Create emergency response procedures

Create detailed recovery procedures

Develop plan distribution and control procedures

Step 5. Plan Validation/Testing

Develop test plans and objectives

Conduct simulations

Perform tests

Evaluate test results

Perform plan process improvements based on test results

Step 6. Maintenance and Training

Develop BCP maintenance process

Consolidate revision information

Develop revised BCP, as required

Create corporate awareness program

Develop BCP-specific training program

Systems Development LifeCycle (SDLC)

Needs Analysis and Initiation Phase

Match system requirements to their related operational processes

Identify Very high system availability requirements –redundant, real-time mirroring at an alternate site and fail-over capabilities to be built into the design

Evaluate IT system to determine recovery priority

Development/Acquisition Phase

Incorporate redundancy and robustness directly into the system architecture to optimize reliability, maintainability, and availability during the Operation/Maintenance Phase

Set priorities of recovery if multiple applications are set as contingent measures.

• Consider redundant communications paths;

• lack of single points of failure;

• enhanced fault tolerance of network components and interfaces;

• power management systems with appropriately sized backup power sources; load balancing; and data mirroring and replication to ensure a uniformly robust system.

Address requirements for the alternate site

Implementation Phase

Develop a test plan

Test accuracy and effectiveness of technical features and recovery procedures of contingency strategies

Clearly document the contingency measures in the contingency plan

Operation and Maintenance Phase

Conduct training and awareness programme on contingency plan procedures to users, administrators, and managers

Ensure Exercises and tests and make it continue to be effective

Regular backups should be conducted and stored offsite

Update plans to reflect changes to procedures based on lessons learned

Disposal Phase

Current system (Legacy) is replaced with a new system

Do not neglect contingency considerations until the new system is operational & fully tested

The legacy system itself can become a backup system.

The legacy system can be used as a test system for the new system to identify its potentially disruptive system flaws.