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.
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