Business Continuance PlanningBusiness continuity is more than minimizing scheduled and unscheduled downtime. First, it’s the strategic and operational framework for examining the way your organization provides its products and services. Additionally, BC is the implementation of methods to increase your organization’s resilience to the disruption or loss of information.
Structured’s experts can help you leverage your technology investments to protect your business and to create an environment that’s safe from disruption. We use a five-step approach to help you develop your business continuance plans. Those steps are:
1. Analysis—We help you identify critical and non-critical functions, time frames within which you need to resume critical functions, and the business and technical requirements for recovery. We also help you identify potential threats (e.g., earthquakes, fires, power outages, etc.), document the potential impacts of such threats and make a list of your recovery requirements.
2. Solution Design—We help you identify the most cost-effective business continuance solution, including your minimum application and application data requirements and the time frames in which they must be available. We also help you define ways to minimize potential exposures.
3. Testing and Organization Acceptance—Structured will help you test your plans and facilitate organizational acceptance. When plans either fail to or no longer meet expectations, we’ll help you modify requirements accordingly.
4. Implementation—When the final plan is in place, documentation has been finalized and it should be executed in case of a disaster.
5. Maintenance—Business continuity plans must be evaluated periodically to ensure their relevance and accuracy. For example, you have to update your staffing information, and information about important clients, vendors and contacts. You also need to keep changes to your organizational structure current. Furthermore, you need to check specialized technical deployments for functionality.
Because of Structured’s expertise in IT infrastructure and security, we can help you design a business continuity plan that aligns your budget with your aversion to risk. We always use the best available technology to make sure you have a secure infrastructure that protects the integrity of your business-critical information.
