Could your business survive 10 days
without?

These are key questions that should be asked of all business units in an organisation on a regular basis. If your business or organisation could not operate without access to these things, you need to take action now. Designing solutions or recovery actions after a disaster can lead to the total failure of an organisation.

Business processes and practices are changing at an ever increasing rate. Additionally, the environment within which your business operates, and the risks you face, are not static. If  your business is to survive and thrive in the face of the unexpected, internal organisational models and structures, including information technology services and disaster recovery need to be reviewed on a regular basis.

Interface Works can assist you to prepare for the unexpected or to review your existing systems and processes so your business is resilent and positioned to turn the threats you face into opportunities.

Increasingly, business continuity and disaster recovery plans are required by diligent directors and stakeholders. They may also be needed for market listings, obtaining or complying with obligations in, significant contracts or investment, preparing a business for sale or organisations working in or with the public sector.

Experience and Independence:

The principal of Interface Works has many years experience working with businesses & organisations as diverse as multinational financial institutions, national universities, health boards and retail chains. Each organisation, regardess of size or the industry it operates in, faces different challenges. Understanding those is the critical first step in designing an appropriate plan.

Development of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans are well defined processes which must reflect your organisation’s particular set of circumstances. Boiler plate solutions will not adequately address your unique requirements.

The following are the general steps required to develop and implement an organisation wide business continuity plan.

Interface Works can work with you on any or all of these steps, bringing experience and independence to the process. Because Interface Works is an independent company you can be confident that when we design a solution we are not simply selling you a product – but addressing your specific needs.

Risk review:

The primary focus of any risk review process is about risk identification, from that flows risk prevention and the ability to guide management on mitigation measures that can be taken to eliminate or reduce identified risks.

The process involves an independent review of the primary infrastructure services installed to service the facility and includes an inspection of the site for resilience, key risks or issues and an assessment of exposures to risk.

The overall objective of any risk review is to assess from a reliability perspective, the suitability of the facility and to ensure that, where possible, all risks to the infrastructure services and the physical facility are identified and steps can be taken to eliminate them.  

Business Impact Analysis:

Business impact analysis (BIA) is an essential component of an organisation's business continuance plan. The result of the analysis is a report which describes the potential risks specific to the organisation. 

A BIA endeavours to identify costs associated with failures, such as loss of cash flow, replacement of equipment, contractual penalties, salaries paid to catch up with a backlog of work, loss of profits, etc. A BIA report also quantifies the relative importance of the various business units and suggests appropriate measures to protect them.

Disaster Recovery planning:

Prior to selecting a disaster recovery strategy, an appropriate BIA needs to be in place. The BIA will have indentified the key metrics of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for various business processes. The metrics specified for the business processes must then be mapped to the underlying IT systems and infrastructure.

The key to effective disaster recovery is having a realistic and well understood set of objectives that are based on the needs of the business. This involves planning and preparation, from the BIA process, to identifying and quantifying risks, to classifying and prioritising applications and data for recovery.

A key factor for success, is integrating disaster recovery into production systems. The dynamic nature of IT requires continuous review and updates of the process and the plan. This must be part of the day-to-day operations to be effective. This is where technical expertise in IT and knowledge of the most appropriate services or solutions available in the market is critical.

Business Continuity Planning:

According to a recent Gartner Group document, a business continuity plan should include: a disaster recovery plan, which specifies an organisation's planned IT strategies for post-failure procedures; a business resumption plan, which specifies a means of maintaining essential services at the crisis location; a business recovery plan, which specifies a means of recovering business functions at an alternate location; and a contingency plan, which specifies a means of dealing with external events that can seriously impact the organisation.

The first step in development of a business continuity plan is for your organisation to have completed a BIA. In our experience, this process often reveals better ways to manage your infrastructure, reduce costs or better utilise existing assets of your business.

From there we can determine the impact on your organisation if individual units cannot function and assess the overall impact on the organisation. Armed with that information we can plan an appropriate organisation-wide capability and recovery process.

If you would like to make a time to discuss the needs of your business, or the suitability of arrangements you already have in place, and how to move forward with business continuity and disaster recovery planning – please contact us.