Worried about downtime? Build an IT Business Continuity Plan for 2015 – Pt. 1 of 2

This entry was posted on December 10, 2014 by Tammy Nyman.

Business Continuity Planning Guide for 2015 part 1

Build an IT Business Continuity Plan. We at MBC focus on making sure your business stays online even in the event of a theft, flood, fire, or other weather disasters. We understand you do not want to lose precious work hours that could be crucial to your business revenue. Our team has put together a Business Continuity Planning guide that could help you stay proactive in the event of a disaster.

The first step is to perform a Business Impact Analysis. In order to do this you must define and differentiate the critical and non-critical functions of your business. A critical business function is defined as a part of your business in which the disruption is unacceptable. The level of disruption acceptability is determined by the lost opportunity costs, cost of recovery solutions, and regulations on your business. In order to ensure the accuracy and value of your Business impact analysis you need to create a committee that involves your key executives and organization stakeholders. Once this is complete you can move on to the next step.

The second step to this process is to set Recovery Time Objectives which is the duration of time the critical business function must be restored after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences. The maximum amount of time set for each business function will relate to to your Business Impact Analysis and the rank of key functions and disruptions.

Once you have performed a Business Impact Analysis and set your Recovery Time Objectives the third step is to perform a full Technology Audit. You will also need to map your applications and infrastructure to your critical business functions. Performing this audit will help you understand the realistic capabilities of your technology solution.

Next week we are going to cover the last steps of developing your Business Continuity Plan. If you have any questions feel free to contact us.