Business Continuity Planning

Keeping a business running despite the challenges of outages, disasters and threats can be daunting. Planning for each type of disaster is difficult, since imagination must substitute for real encounters. This is where predictive modeling comes to the foreground. By using exhaustive modeling, a wide variety of disaster conditions can be tested in a virtual environment, so that the business continuity planning (BCP) effort can be effective when exercised, rather than simply hoping for the best.

 

BCPs need to scale for organizational growth and evolution. There is extensive evidence that firms that do not invest enough time and resources into BCP preparations are less likely to survive as viable entities after a disaster. As an example, 42.85% (150 of 350) of the businesses affected by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing failed to survive the event. Years later, the affected firms with good BCP documentation were back in business within days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

 

BCP creates and validates a logistical plan for how an organization will recover and restore interrupted critical functions after a disaster or disruption. It is the method by which an organization prepares for future incidents that could jeopardize the organization's core mission and long term health. These incidents range from naturally occurring disasters, i.e., earthquakes, hurricanes, etc., to pandemic illness, terrorism and simpler utility or facility outages.

 

There are normally five phases of the creation of a BCP:
-Analysis
-Solution design
-Implementation
-Testing and organizational acceptance
-Maintenance

 

As an organization navigates through these steps, Solitaire Interglobal Ltd. (SIL) can provide critical assistance in the production of a comprehensive and flexible plan. As part of the BCP creation, SIL provides significant analysis in the identification of threat and impact, and can model the various scenarios for key criteria. This allows the organization to then devote its energies to crafting the strategies that best suit the organizational objectives and constraints.


The SIL risk assessment modeling takes into account many factors. In the forefront of this assessment is the impact of various business disruption scenarios on both the institution and its customers. This is tempered by analysis that looks at the probability of occurrence. It takes into account the loss impact on information services, technology, personnel, facilities, and service providers from both internal and external sources. Indicative impact is also generated that touches on some peripheral items, such as the safety of critical processing documents and vital records.


SIL BCP models document critical BCP components, such as the time frame in which the vital function must be resumed after the disaster, and the business and technical requirements for that recovery. SIL threat analysis helps define the most likely threats that should be addressed in the BCP. These threats can be from many sources, including disease, storm, flood, cyber attack, terrorism, utility outage, etc. SIL models the geography of all an organization’s locations and facilities, their susceptibility to natural threats (e.g., location in a flood plain), and proximity to critical infrastructures (e.g., power sources, nuclear power plants, airports, major highways, railroads) when assessing the probability of a specific event occurring. These impact scenarios are generated within the SIL BCP models with cost, risk profiling and probability analysis. All of this information is provided in electronic and hardcopy form, and can be easily included in the formal BCP documentation. Disaster recovery plans frequently include areas outside of the IT applications domain. SIL will include those components in the model as desired.


Since this documentation is critical to the successful business recovery, the SIL output covers a wide range of information for each scenario. Staffing and facility requirements are included, covering such diverse metrics such as the numbers and types of desks and the peripheral requirements like printers, copier, fax machine, etc., as well as some of the other business environments, such as production, distribution, warehousing etc.


A supplemental goal of BCP efforts is the identification of the most cost effective disaster recovery solution that meets the minimum application and application data requirements, and the time frame in which the minimum application and application data must be available. That optimization effort is integral to the SIL modeling process.
SIL increases the speed of the plan production and its comprehensiveness by applying its heuristic data to the impact analysis, threat analysis and identification of critical requirements within the plan. The impact analysis output from SIL helps in the differentiation between critical and non-critical organization functions. Since what constitutes a critical function varies among organizations, the definition of what damage is regarded as unacceptable is developed in concert with the customer team. And since the perception of the acceptability of disruption may be modified by the cost of establishing and maintaining appropriate business or technical recovery solutions, SIL produces a full cost analysis as part of its model. This model also takes into account those functions that are mandated by law.


The BCP effort does not end with the initial creation of the plan. As the implementation phase is initiated, SIL takes the information from the BCP tests and calibrates the model with timeframes and expands it to include any surfacing anomalies. Since the BCP is normally executed on a biannual or annual schedule, SIL can validate and update the BCP model after each test.


As the organization changes its applications, business functions and requirements, the BCP should also change. The SIL BCP model will evolve to keep pace with the current environment, and can be used to provide a safety check for emerging problems.

 

 

 

 

 

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