The Steps to Success

There are a number of key steps that you must take in order to make a business continuity exercise a success:

Commitment

This is absolutely critical to the business resilience effort and therefore is needed from your key personnel. If it is not a critical objective, it will not get the attention it needs and will never receive the ongoing attention, funding or level of cooperation over all departments that it truly needs to be successful.

Calculate Downtime Cost

Your company really needs to know the potential losses associated with business downtime. With improved technology now available that can provide standby sites and back-up facilities to bring your business back up to speed quickly (click here to learn more), it is important to know how much cost you are avoiding by implementing such solutions. Calculating the real cost of downtime is sometimes difficult - financial losses are normally easier to project, however, lost transactions and slowed production will also do irreparable harm to customer and supplier relationships.

Determine Importance

You need to set out recovery objectives and recovery point objectives using a tiered structure where systems are restored according to their level of importance. You don’t want to spend time and money recovering your less critical systems before your real core systems are restored.

System Dependence

Are your critical systems reliant upon smaller systems? If your recovery does not include those, you may not be able to run your mission-critical applications even after they have been restored! Take the time to look closely, particularly at custom applications that may have become, over time, a key part of your information flow.

Test Critical Restores

How often do you test your restore procedures? If your critical systems need to be restored within hours, you should do a comprehensive test at least quarterly. Your critical procedures must be tested in a real-time environment and also involving your end users. Because problems most often occur when you restore archived data, it is worth looking at technology that can mitigate corruption in real time (click here for more information).

Manage Personnel Churn

Key personnel may be off site when a disaster strikes. This means you need to take the time to spread there knowledge through a number of staff to enable the performance of recovery without them. You also need to monitor placement of staff at different locations so that you will always have the right personnel to manage recovery in each office. As well as managing these issues you should always be aware when personnel leave your company and that their recovery knowledge must be passed onto another member of staff.

Ensure Recovery Vendors

Providers of DR products and services will tend to assure you that they have everything handled and even be willing to say so on paper. But can they really meet your current RTO and SLA requirements? Every environment is different, so technology that is sufficient for one customer may not be for another. A surprise test will not only tell you something about your vendors’ capabilities but provide further training in recovery procedures for your staff.

Redundancy

Even if your infrastructure is generally strong, you still need to make sure that no single point of failure exists. This includes considering the possibility of human error and continually analyzing your infrastructure as you make changes or add new systems. You may have had ten out of ten successful trial recoveries to date, but you need to be on the lookout for new design weaknesses that may have been introduced since the last test.

Keep Up-To-Date

Unfortunately most IT documentation is left for when you have time to do it. But you can’t afford to do this with your disaster recovery process. Sometimes companies are well set up initially with documentation but fail to update it after changes have been introduced. This means that, when new staff come in, they will have a difficult time. The companies that really do an effective job with documentation have not only an IT team dedicated to the process but someone in the business unit whose job is DR. As business owners, they focus on both the technology and people process and make sure that documentation doesn’t lag.

Test, Test, Test

This is the biggest key to success, without testing your business continuity from time to time how will you truly know it will work when the time comes? It helps to create as many different disaster testing scenarios as you can then walk through the recovery steps for each to make sure you’re not overlooking seemingly minor details that could cause major problems. Testing will only help you to re-define your business continuity to better suit your business and ultimately improve your chances of success. Try to create scenarios involving human error or vandalism. From time to time, try pulling the plug out of the wall or initiating other surprise tests on a limited scale to see if your staff follows recovery procedures. You may also find that simple precautions can limit your exposure to a number of threats.

Business Continuity Centres has the solutions and experience to help you every step of the way, so please feel free to call us for impartial advice on 08457 715 715.