Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery
It’s hard to find time to invest in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. Often the pressures of BAU operations and the costs and the complexities involved can push this essential area down the list of priorities, where it stays until things go wrong and questions are asked. ITD have a number of engagements that can get to the bottom of the key risks and provide pragmatic advice of how to plan for the worst.
Business Risk Identification
We take a close look at your business, identify and understand the real risks and how they can be mitigated, the areas that are essential and how they can be protected in the event of the unexpected. We produce a plan that can be used to decide what services will be given the priority should a disaster arise and how they will be managed in a practical way.
Business Operational Asset Identification
We review your operational assets and identify the criticality of each and their place in ensuring your business operations. We identify and document the existing plans for how these critical assets could be available to your business in the time of a disaster, and what the plans and processes would need to be there to ensure they were available. We identify your current situation and your chosen state and the gap between them, and the steps to move from one to the other.
Business Continuity Plan Development
IT Disaster recovery is a component of Business Continuity, and so a good IT DR plan begins with a true understanding of Business Continuity. You may have a disaster recovery plan but is it solely IT centric? And if so how relevant is your IT DR to your business and what is it really protecting your business against? You wouldn’t buy insurance without understanding what you are insuring yourself against, so why rely on IT DR plans that are really only about getting your IT systems working and not about keeping your business going? ITD can review your BC plans and see how they fit with your IT DR, identify the gaps and advise you on how you can bridge them.
Disaster Recovery Plan Development
Developing a disaster recovery plan is complex, and often there is a significant amount of assumption made about how the tasks required to reinstate services will be carried out. While the commitment and professionalism of staff is essential in times of adversity, the likelihood of a successful outcome increases dramatically if you have planned and documented the steps on the path to recovery. We will work with your key resources to produce the plan, organise the tests and report on the outcomes so you have the plan at hand, and the proof that it works.
Disaster Recovery Solution Test
Untested disaster recovery plans are of little value, and the last thing you want to be doing in a crisis is finding out for the first time if your DR plans will work. We will review your plans, design a test around then and manage the test which is carried out by the key team resources in your company. We produce a Post Test Review document that then feeds back into the plans as continuous improvement, and gives you the collateral to be confident in your reports to the Board.