A comprehensive business continuity service including risk assessment, risk mitigation, strategy development, business continuity planning, testing, training and awareness.

1. List key processes and their key components.

These can be very varied depending on your organisation's activities; a skilled professional can help ensure that you do not omit the small, but essential, items.

2. Identify the potential threats to your key business processes.

Experience helps you identify the threats within your organisation as well as those affecting the airport down the road, your suppliers ceasing to trade etc.

3. Implement Risk Reduction Measures.

A Business Continuity Practitioner can help you identify the many things that can be done easily and cheaply.  But some things will cost - so manage the risk.

4. Plan, review and test your plans.

It is very rare for an organisation to spend too much time on testing and involving people in the business continuity plans for their own processes.

CONFUSED BY TERMINOLOGY?

Business Continuity?

Contingency Planning?

Disaster Recovery?

Service Interruption?

Don't worry about the terminology, it doesn't really matter.  Just start on your risk assessment and implement your risk reduction measures and high level business continuity plan now!!!

BUSINESS CONTINUITY EXPERIENCE

• Business Continuity Manager for 6 years for a 1,000 member IS department in a high profile gas utility, supporting 1,200 servers at 50 locations throughout the UK in a fast changing environment.

• Developed, implemented and maintained a fully equipped 120 position in-house workspace recovery site.

• IT Audit experience for 15 years including reviewing business continuity arrangements for 15 organisations.

• Worked with owners to categorise and prioritise business applications, IT applications and IT processes.

• Risk assessment using various methodologies and development of risk mitigation strategies.

• Tested application recoveries on diverse systems that utilised recoveries via tapes, redo logs, remote disk mirroring and parallel processing.

• Responsible for documenting recovery plans for 600 applications and environments on 1,200 servers and mainframes (HP, Sun, Fujitsu, Compaq, Sequent, IBM).

• Raised business continuity awareness through newsletters, bulletins, posters, and a series of one day training courses attended by more than 200 staff.

• Designed and ran varied simulation exercises for Crisis Management processes.

• Managed and developed a team of up to 12 business continuity professionals combined with staff new to IS and BC.

• The quality of the Business Continuity processes and their documentation was demonstrated by their continual selection as part of the ISO9001 retention processes.

• Designed an Access database for business continuity planning purposes that was extensively used by other IS teams as it was the most comprehensive list of applications and servers within IS.