Business Planning

The purpose of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is to provide measures on how to keep the critical business operations in your unit running in the event of a disruption. A disruption can come in the form of an electrical outage, fire, flood, or in any other way that would disrupt your operations in a significant manner. Having a business continuity plan in place will not only be key in how you respond to an emergency situation, but will also identify ways to minimize or avoid the potential damages caused by taking the first appropriate steps in such an event.

NSA will help your business develop a business continuity plan that includes a disaster recovery plan (DRP), which is more the "nuts and bolts" on how your unit will resume business. This includes, a plan maintained for emergency response, backup operations, and post-disaster recovery for an information systems (IS), to ensure the availability of critical resources and to facilitate the continuity of operations in an emergency situation.

Business Continuity planning is something you should do, not only because the disaster recovery plan for your services requires an unacceptably long period of time for services to be restored, it may be required by law or directive.

Depending on your organization's services you may be subject to specific requirements to ensure continuation of financial, medical, security or other services with a minimum set of standards even while your "normal" infrastructure and resources are not available.

At NSA our primary responsibilities is to ensure the availability of critical computing services for your organization. Part of this responsibility is to have a fully documented plan to expedite the recovery of such services in the event that one or more are lost due to some sort of emergency or disaster. A formal Business Continuity Plan is needed to ensure that all critical services are considered.

Building a comprehensive Business Continuity (BC) Plan will require working with the various business units in your organization to accomplish the following:  

• Determine the most critical systems and applications provided by IT
• Develop alternate temporary work processes to use if critical IT services are unavailable
• Identify tools or processes to minimize risks/threats identified in the DR
• Research, gain approval for, and implement improved recovery plans for critical services
• Consolidate the business function plans with the improved DR plan
• Develop a process to review, exercise, and update the BC plan on a 6-month basis (minimum)

 Developing the IT Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan will include:  

• Assessing the risks or threats that could inhibit the availability of services
• Formalizing disaster recovery plans for each area of IT
• Consolidating area plans into a comprehensive IT DR plan
• Identify critical vs. non-critical services
• Provide a consistent method for responding to loss of critical services
• Provide for the recovery of the most critical services first
• Allow business units to continue functioning (via alternate work processes) while services are being restored

NSA will help your organization to develop a Business Continuity Plan, and build a comprehensive IT Disaster Recovery Plan to protect your clients and your business.