Business Continuity Plan - Tips, Advice?

aproctor

aproctor

aproctor

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I am learning the basics of Business Continuity Plans as i have not come across them since uni, where it was only covered briefly in my modules.

Has anyone got any tips and advice or better yet some short, sharp examples they have lying around?

I've looked online but sometimes it is difficult to see the wood from the trees and i am sure there are some talented soles on here who may be able to offer some advice.

Thanks

Andy
 
What sort of business? For some people a ups is sufficient, for others a warm site to move staff to is sufficient.
 
Morba said:
What sort of business? For some people a ups is sufficient, for others a warm site to move staff to is sufficient.
Click to expand...

Local Authority, i see what you are saying but a warm site might be hard to establish for hundreds of people.
 
You should look to faciliate business continuity by ensuring there is an active gameplan to transition to an alternative method of publication should a there be a major incident.

Translation:

Always have a spare toner cartridge.
 
the company i work for has a decent sized data centre with a several petabyte SAN and more clusters than i care to remember

Each of the physical boxs has a UPS, and all the comms equipment for the Vm clusters etc.. is attached to UPS as well.

In the event of a powercut, the UPS kick in, and the backup generator outside is used instead. Its diesel driven and is about the size of a 40 foot lorry without the wheels. This then kicks in and can supply power for as long as we've got diesel for. Think we have a couple of days worth in reserve.

Just in case the worst happens, we have a failover site as well at another location.

All the SAN's are mirrored and if the worst should happen such as massive fire / flooding we can failover and just switch to the alternate location which is the other side of leeds.


the NHS contracts we hold have nasty penalities for service outages so naturally the continuity plan is geared up to ensure that there can never be any more than a few minutes downtime.

Most of the servers are VMware clusters so if one physical machine fails the image for one sever can be vmotioned elsewhere without effecting performance too much. We always have a couple of hosts spare that the image can be moved to if required without notice.

if a UPS fails we have on call engineers with pagers and UPS sat in stock in readyness. if a UPS does fail engineer will be paged and can usually get a replacement UPS fitted within an hour if needed, but they are self tested every week so this rarely happens.


obviously every business is different, some business couldnt afford an alternate location with an exact duplicate of their datacentres and a link to get all the data synced up. As already said, for some a UPS is going to enough.
 
Business contiunity is not only about the technical aspects it is also about the numerous other aspects that are required for a business to run.

Simulations are often very useful exercises to determine what is required should "x" happen. X can be anything from technical failures to the MD dying on the journey to work.
 
thats a good point.

what happens if there is a pandemic of some sort and 50 % of your staff call in on the same day ?

Theres the human as well as the technical aspect.
 
Just for giggles there is also the following things to consider:

Changes to cashflow
Legal action against the company
New legislation (native language / plain english etc)
Investigation by regulatory bodies
Loss of customers
Hostile takeover (not relevant to LAs obviously)
flooding / fire / earthquake etc

There are all sorts of things that could impact your business - business continuity is all about making sure the company can continue to run.

From a nearby local authority:

http://www.manchester.gov.uk/downloads/914/civil_emergencies-business_continuity_advice
 
You need to work out what is required to keep the business running in certain eventualities.

For example, heavy snow. What if half of workforce couldn't get to work. Do some people live walking distance, etc.
What if all computers were down for a certain period of time.
What if there was a fire and the building was burned down. Etc.

Most businesses will be different.
 
But first of all you need to establish what needs to have bcp in place, what is critical and what isn't.
 
Place i'm at now is about to kick off a project to build another DC in the UK, with some systems being active active....should be a good project to be on.
 
aproctor said:
Local Authority, i see what you are saying but a warm site might be hard to establish for hundreds of people.
Click to expand...

You don't need it to be for hundreds of people, at least not in the first instance - look at what is absolutely business critical e.g. are there any products/services that must be available at all times? Then you can work out whether you need a new site maintained or if you can possibly piggyback onto another office within the local authorities remit - maybe there's some spare capacity or maybe you can boot out a couple of their less vital workers for the period that your main office is down...

It's usually a good idea to look at the likelihoods of a catastrophic failure or perhaps the more likely partial failure, do you have any sort of redundancy? Without knowing a bit more the best anyone can give is a few general questions but maybe they'll help to start.

As Bar mentions it's worth spending some time thinking about how you'll transition staff to a new site if necessary - making it familiar if possible will help here. Are the staff aware of what to do in an emergency? Is there a clear designated set of procedures to follow e.g. does the first one in take ownership or more likely do they phone up their boss and they become the senior responsible owner - who is responsible for contacting all other staff and warning them or saying who should or should not come into work that day? Are all the details available if you can't access the computers? Do you have a copy of the BCP available at another location for people to follow?
 
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