Every critical application in the enterprise has to be part of a business continuity plan because companies depend on the availability of those applications to reliably support business transactions. Business continuity plans must encompasses the planning, preparatory and related activities which will ensure that an organization’s critical business functions will either continue to operate despite serious incidents or disasters that might otherwise have interrupted them, or will be recovered to an operational state within a reasonably short period.
Business Continuity Planning Best Practices
The best practices approach to business continuity requires that three critical areas be addressed:
Resilience: critical business functions and the supporting infrastructure are designed and engineered in such a way that they are materially unaffected by most disruptions, for example through the use of redundancy and spare capacity;
Recovery: arrangements are made to recover or restore critical and less critical business functions that fail for some reason.
Contingency: the organization establishes a generalized capability and readiness to cope effectively with whatever major incidents and disasters occur, including those that were not, and perhaps could not, have been foreseen. Contingency preparations constitute a last-resort response if resilience and recovery arrangements should prove inadequate in practice.
At Great Northern Consulting, we have been providing end to end solutions in business continuity for over 25 years, offering consulting services to develop business continuity plans and the project methodologies needed to put those plans into operation. We also work closely with senior management to translate client availability requirements into a set of IT operational objectives which can then be deployed into the organization’s infrastructure.