CONTINUITY SOLUTIONS

Over time Business Continuity has become a subject that few businesses are able to ignore. Our solutions recognise the delicate balance that needs to be struck between having a robust continuity solution within a budgetary framework that is affordable. A true continuity plan takes time to develop because it may involve organisational change, long term budget requirements, changes to underlying systems etc. and this all needs to be managed as a programme of change. Some of the considerations are discussed below:-

Risk Identification

It is important with any continuity plan to identify the risks that are to be mitigated. The likelihood of a particular type of event and its impact need to be assessed to decide whether that scenario is to be included now, addressed later or ignored.

Recovery Point and Timescales

In the event of a disaster the time to recover and the point to which you are able to recover to must be defined. This often varies for each scenario because the nature of the event will dictate the operational status of the business and therefore its ability to use a recovered system.

Complexity

The complexity of a given solution must be assessed against the available IT skills of the business - generally speaking complexity reduces as expenditure increases so an agreed balance must be struck.

Operational Capability

A decision needs to be taken as to what is an acceptable operational capability in the event of a disaster - in some cases a small team to manage the ongoing workload and communicate with clients, partners etc. is acceptable. In other cases anything less than full operational capability would risk key contracts for the business and this would be unacceptable.

Clearly there are many other considerations to deliver a successful solution. The points above are provided as an illustration only of these points.