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Datacenter business continuity and disaster recovery

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Disasters are unpredictable, but Microsoft datacenters and operations personnel prepare for disasters to provide continuity of operations should unexpected events occur. Resilient architecture and up-to-date tested continuity plans mitigate potential damage and promote swift recovery of datacenter operations. Crisis management plans provide clarity on roles, responsibilities, and mitigation activities before, during, and after a crisis. The roles and contacts defined in these plans facilitate effective escalation up the chain of command during crisis situations.

Business resilience

Under Microsoft Cloud Operations and Innovation (CO+I) Business Continuity Program, datacenters are required to test the continued operation and response to crisis events. Each Microsoft managed datacenter has their own business continuity plan, created by using the key subject matter expertise from CO+I Resilience Center of Excellence and Datacenter Operations to ensure that site-specific context is factored into emergency preparedness. These plans describe roles, responsibilities, personnel safety procedures, notification criteria, escalations steps, and checklists for different disaster scenarios.

Microsoft's CO+I organization's Resilience function is governed by the Enterprise Business Continuity Management program and follows the Enterprise Policies and Standards. The program's performance is reviewed on a periodic basis by the Business Continuity Council, departmental leadership, and ultimately Microsoft's Senior Leadership Team.

Crisis management and pandemic response

The Crisis Management Program is an integral part of Microsoft's response to major events given its global presence. Microsoft's Datacenter Crisis Management Plan is based on industry-best practices and includes the critical components required to allow for a tactical approach in responding to major events. In addition, CO+I Resilience Center of Excellence developed and continues to maintain a Pandemic and Infectious Disease Plan that is used to respond to infectious diseases that may have an operational impact. As part of our pandemic response, the resilience support team provides critical and timely local disease intelligence to Redmond-based Microsoft leadership to facilitate a comprehensive mitigation strategy.

Microsoft has established an organization-wide Enterprise Resilience and Crisis Management (ERCM) framework that serves as a guideline for developing Business Continuity Program across the company. The program includes Business Continuity Policy, Implementation Guidelines, Business Impact Analysis (BIA), Risk Assessment, Dependency Analysis, and procedures for monitoring and improving the program. Enterprise Resilience Office manages the governance and performance reporting across Microsoft. The CO+I Resilience program is coordinated through the CO+I Resilience Center of Excellence to ensure that the program adheres to a coherent long-term vision and mission, and is consistent with enterprise program standards, methods, policies, and metrics. CO+I Resilience Center of Excellence established a series of Standards designed to provide additional governance to the CO+I organization.

The CO+I Technology Resilience Plans (TRPs) are intended for various Engineering Groups within CO+I for the recovery from high-severity incidents or disasters to help ensure that our critical technology remains available.

The Business Resilience Plan (BRP) and TRP includes scope and applicable dependencies for the services, restoration procedures, and communications with the Incident Management team. The BRP and TRP are reviewed and approved at least annually by dedicated plan owners and made available to all applicable users. The plans are tested per the defined testing schedule as part of applicable standards.

Resiliency Program

Microsoft has defined the BRP to serve as a guide to respond, recover, and resume operations during a serious adverse event. The BRP covers the key personnel, resources, services, and actions required to continue critical business processes and operations. The development of the BRP is based on recommended guidelines of Microsoft's Enterprise Resilience Office.

In scope for this plan are Microsoft's critical business processes, defined as needed within 24 hours or less. These processes are determined during a BIA, in which Microsoft estimated potential operational and financial impacts if they could not perform a process and determined the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Following the BIA, a Non-Technical Dependency Analysis is performed to determine the specific people, applications, vital records, and user requirements necessary to perform the process.

Microsoft periodically tests the BRP to assess its effectiveness, usability, and to identify areas where risks can be eliminated or mitigated. When applicable, third parties are involved in the test if there are dependencies associated with them. The results of testing are documented, validated, approved by appropriate personnel. This information is used to create and prioritize work items.

Datacenter Resilience Program

As part of the datacenter Resilience program, the CO+I Resilience Center of Excellence team develops the methods, policies, and metrics that address the information security requirements needed for the organization's business continuity. The team develops TRPs for the continued operations of critical processes and required resources if disruptions occur.

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Top Three Business Continuity Factors for Data Centers

Individuals and organizations alike rely on data centers to be up and running 24x7x365. With the emergence of cloud-based technologies, data center infrastructure and uptime has become a prominent factor when it comes to internet-based tools. As a result, business continuity factors for data centers have become increasingly important, and downtime prevention is more critical than ever.

SaaS, web hosting, data backups, redundancy, email, shared apps, and so many other technologies we often take for granted would not exist if not for data center reliability. Whether you are operating your own local data center, you colocate your servers in a managed data center, or your organization helps support multiple customer data centers, there are three key factors that need to be constantly monitored to help maintain the uptime your servers, software, and applications require.

Every data center should have multiple stages of power redundancy, including (but not limited to) uninterruptible power supplies for each rack or cabinet as well as a standby failover generator. The UPS units will help provide momentary power as well as surge protection in the event a backup generator needs to turn on after main power loss.

While many data centers have redundant power, it is critical to monitor and test failover procedures on a regular basis. Power monitoring will let your staff know if there are any issues with main or backup power feeds, or if they have kicked in due to a problem with electricity delivery. Testing failover will let you know that the business continuity plan you have in place for power is working, as most failover events tend to happen during extreme weather such as blizzards or hurricanes that can make reaching the data center nearly impossible.

It’s also important to monitor and check the fuel levels of any backup generators that are installed at your facility. Having a nearly empty tank when faced with the prospect of a multiple-day weather event like a hurricane is a problem. Make sure you can easily see the fuel tank level, or receive automatic notifications in the event your fuel tank level drops below certain points.

Reliable and consistent internet access is another key component to data center uptime. Your business continuity plan should include both redundant internet feeds, as well as the ability to monitor status of usage and uptime on all circuits into your data center.

There are many ways to provide redundant internet access to your data center, including using different carriers who deliver bandwidth over different physical circuits, as well as bringing in bandwidth through different technologies. Thankfully advances in bandwidth delivery as well as the lowering costs of services like fiber and Metro Ethernet have made it much easier for data centers to have reliable, cost-effective connections.

As noted earlier, monitoring the uptime status of the internet connections into your data center (or the delivery of bandwidth to your cabinets if you are colocating with a third-party data center) will help improve your uptime and also help you maintain consistent connectivity. You should be monitoring the bandwidth usage on each circuit, as bottlenecking in the event of a high-usage user (or the unfortunate event of an external DDoS attack) can also cause potential problems or downtime for your data center and your users.

Your business continuity plan should address both capacity as well as reliability of your internet connections, in addition to also providing ways to monitor your bandwidth to help alleviate any problems with the circuits, carriers, or usage before they become service affecting.

Environment

Monitoring the temperature and humidity in a few locations of a data center is not enough. Specific areas such as the top rear of cabinets as well as near HVAC vents should have dedicated monitoring available to immediately alert support staff of temperatures that are exceeding the normal range of operations.

Flood monitoring is also an important factor when it comes to keeping an eye on the environment in your data center to help maintain uptime. The introduction of water due to inclement weather, burst pipes, construction accidents, or any other unforeseen issue can lead to almost immediate server and infrastructure damage. It goes without saying that every data center will have fire and smoke monitoring per local building codes, however it’s been proven that flood damage is 10x more likely to occur than fire damage. Installing flood monitoring is critical to helping prevent water-related damages within your data center.

Organizations who colocate their servers in an outside data center should invest in their own environment monitoring, which can be located within their own assigned space. Many data centers monitor their own facilities, however many do so for their own notification purposes and may not share environment data with their users. In a larger data center with sparse monitoring, their alerts may not be sent until far too late, and your own equipment may be at risk if they are not monitoring close to your racks or cabinets. Protect your own investment by including environment monitoring in your cabinets so you can rest assured that your servers are operating in idea conditions, since you cannot control the environment in a third-party data center.

Business continuity planning for maximum data center uptime

Whether you are operating your own data center or colocating in an external facility, it’s important that you have a business continuity plan to maintain maximum uptime. There are certainly other factors beyond what we’ve mentioned above, such as physical security and documented standard operating procedures for staff, however by including power, bandwidth, and environment monitoring in your business continuity plan you’ll be covering the vast majority of downtime and outages causes to data centers.

Don’t wait until an outage costs your organization hard-earned revenue or customers. By creating your data center business continuity plan right from the start, and including monitoring of primary outage factors, you’ll be helping to guarantee uptime and service availability within your data center.

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Home  >  Learning Center  >  Business continuity planning (BCP)  

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Business continuity planning (bcp), what is business continuity.

In an IT context, business continuity is the capability of your enterprise to stay online and deliver products and services during disruptive events, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks and communication failures.

The core of this concept is the business continuity plan — a defined strategy that includes every facet of your organization and details procedures for maintaining business availability.

Start with a business continuity plan

Business continuity management starts with planning how to maintain your critical functions (e.g., IT, sales and support) during and after a disruption.

A business continuity plan (BCP) should comprise the following element

1. Threat Analysis

The identification of potential disruptions, along with potential damage they can cause to affected resources. Examples include:

2. Role assignment

Every organization needs a well-defined chain of command and substitute plan to deal with absence of staff in a crisis scenario. Employees must be cross-trained on their responsibilities so as to be able to fill in for one another.

Internal departments (e.g., marketing, IT, human resources) should be broken down into teams based on their skills and responsibilities. Team leaders can then assign roles and duties to individuals according to your organization’s threat analysis.

3. Communications

A communications strategy details how information is disseminated immediately following and during a disruptive event, as well as after it has been resolved.

Your strategy should include:

  • Methods of communication (e.g., phone, email, text messages)
  • Established points of contact (e.g., managers, team leaders, human resources) responsible for communicating with employees
  • Means of contacting employee family members, media, government regulators, etc.

From electrical power to communications and data, every critical business component must have an adequate backup plan that includes:

  • Data backups to be stored in different locations. This prevents the destruction of both the original and backup copies at the same time. If necessary, offline copies should be kept as well.
  • Backup power sources, such as generators and inverters that are provisioned to deal with power outages.
  • Backup communications (e.g., mobile phones and text messaging to replace land lines) and backup services (e.g., cloud email services to replace on-premise servers).

Load balancing business continuity

Load balancing  maintains business continuity by distributing incoming requests across multiple backend servers in your data center. This provides redundancy in the event of a server failure, ensuring continuous application uptime.

In contrast to the reactive measures used in failover and  disaster recovery  (described below) load balancing is a preventative measure.  Health monitoring  tracks server availability, ensuring accurate load distribution at all times—including during disruptive events.

Disaster recovery plan (DCP) – Your second line of defense

Even the most carefully thought out business continuity plan is never completely foolproof. Despite your best efforts, some disasters simply cannot be mitigated. A disaster recovery plan (DCP) is a second line of defense that enables you to bounce back from the worst disruptions with minimal damage.

As the name implies, a disaster recovery plan deals with the restoration of operations after a major disruption. It’s defined by two factors: RTO and  RPO .

disaster recovery plan

  • Recovery time objective (RTO)  – The acceptable downtime for critical functions and components, i.e., the maximum time it should take to restore services. A different RTO should be assigned to each of your business components according to their importance (e.g., ten minutes for network servers, an hour for phone systems).
  • Recovery point objective (RPO)  – The point to which your state of operations must be restored following a disruption. In relation to backup data, this is the oldest age and level of staleness it can have. For example, network servers updated hourly should have a maximum RPO of 59 minutes to avoid data loss.

Deciding on specific RTOs and RPOs helps clearly show the technical solutions needed to achieve your recovery goals. In most cases the decision is going to boil down to choosing the right failover solution.

See how Imperva Load Balancer can help you with business continuity planning.

Choosing the right failover solutions

Failover  is the switching between primary and backup systems in the event of failure, outage or downtime. It’s the key component of your disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

A failover system should address both RTO and RPO goals by keeping backup infrastructure and data at the ready. Ideally, your failover solution should seamlessly kick in to insulate end users from any service degradation.

When choosing a solution, the two most important aspects to consider are its technological prowess and its service level agreement (SLA). The latter is often a reflection of the former.

For an IT organization charged with the business continuity of a website or web application, there are three failover options:

  • Hardware solutions  – A separate set of servers, set up and maintained internally, are kept on-premise to come online in the event of failure. However, note that keeping such servers at the same location makes them potentially susceptible to being taken down by the same disaster/disturbance.
  • DNS services  – DNS services are often used in conjunction with hardware solutions to redirect traffic to a backup server(s) at an external data center. A downside of this setup includes  TTL-related delays  that can prevent seamless disaster recovery. Additionally, managing both DNS and internal data center hardware failover solutions is time consuming and complicated.
  • On-edge services  – On-edge failover is a managed solution operating from off-prem (e.g., from the  CDN  layer). Such solutions are more affordable and, most importantly, have no TTL reliance, resulting in near-instant failover that allows you to meet the most aggressive RTO goals.

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Key aspects for ensuring business continuity in data centers

  • Business continuity
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Business continuity in data centers during crisis situations

Events like the heavy snowfall provoked by Storm Filomena in Madrid last January or the coronavirus pandemic we are facing have highlighted the importance of business continuity . Contingency and Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is simply essential for critical infrastructures like data centers, but not only. In the digital economy, DR planning has become indispensable for virtually any organisation; in light of the increase of cyberattacks, the adverse effects of climate change, etc.

As their services are critical to many organizations and essential sectors, data centers are experts in service continuity and disaster recovery planning . So, any company can learn a lot from their expertise. That is why, after the heavy snowfall, we talked to Equinix — one of the data centers where Stackscale has infrastructure — to know more about how they managed such an unusual situation in Madrid. From their experience, we have gathered some key aspects for ensuring business continuity in data centers during crisis situations .

Anticipation and coordination

Proactivity, communication and coordination are key. As we explain in our article about designing a DR plan , defining a clear protocol of action is vital for ensuring that, when the time comes, the plan can be executed smoothly. After all, activating the protocols established for crisis situations is the first step in case of an emergency.

Equinix’s Director of Facility Operations in Spain, Juan Romero, explains that one of their first actions, in the light of Storm Filomena, was to contact the corresponding public authorities to ensure the data center entrance’s clean up was prioritized. At the same time they anticipated the necessary equipment for removing snow as well as food and beverages for the employees that remained in the facilities.

Teams’ availability and organization

Technical and security teams always play an important role; but especially during crisis situations. That is why, during the heavy snowfall in Madrid, one of the main Equinix’s actions was to accommodate essential employees in nearby hotels in order to guarantee infrastructure and service continuity . Apart from technical and security staff, data centers also reinforced staff for shoveling snow on the rooftop — where the mechanical shovels could not access.

System monitoring and control reinforcement

Managing, maintaining and monitoring the infrastructure is part of the daily work in any data center. To monitor their long list of critical parameters, data centers rely on automation . This way, they can quickly notice if there is any issue and can easily control that no event disrupts the infrastructure . 

System monitoring and control become even more critical during crisis situations and are, therefore, reinforced. Technicians must be especially attentive to any anomaly or disruption an unusual situation might provoke . In Equinix data centers in Madrid , for instance, systems were checked every 30 minutes during the heavy snowfall. Since, although it might be common in other locations, Madrid hadn’t experienced such a snowfall for decades.

To sum up, when facing an emergency situation, not only is it important to have the right resources, but also to properly coordinate them in order to be fully prepared for any contingency.

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  • January 17, 2017

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To formulate a business continuity plan we must first outline what makes a successful business continuity plan.  A data center’s business continuity plan will function as a roadmap.  If a disaster strikes, you will hopefully be able to find the type of disaster in your business continuity plan and then begin following the “map” to get to the solution and restore your data center to business as usual. First and foremost, a proper business continuity plan will focus on what can be done to prevent disasters so that business continuity is never interrupted in the first place. Data centers must consider what their unique needs are because there is no such thing as a generic data center business continuity plan – it would never work.  Data centers must identify and asses all mission critical assets and risks.  Once they have been identified it will be far easier to formulate a business continuity plan with specific goals in mind.  You can prioritize your most problematic risks by focusing on the risk they pose to mission critical assets. In considering individual needs it is imperative that data centers determine what applications and processes are mission critical. For example, you’re your mission critical systems be maintained remotely? Additionally, in today’s data center world where security is a top concern, maintaining data security should be an important part of your business continuity plan.

Disaster prevention is a central part of your data center’s business continuity plan.  Identifying business continuity goals and potential problem areas will help you lay out a proper disaster prevention plan.  Depending on your unique data center, certain measures may be beneficial such as increased inspections of infrastructure, better surveillance, enhanced security in various areas including data centers grounds security and rack-based security, increased redundancy, and more.  Think in terms of real problems and real consequences; be specific so that you can make specific business continuity plans and strategies.

Some data centers may want to relocate their data center if a disaster is incredibly large but the logistics of this are far from simple.  Relocating for a disaster safely, rapidly, and securely is no simple task.  And, beyond that, it is expensive which is why many data centers – even large enterprise data centers – do not do this.  To do this properly as part of a business continuity plan, a detailed data center migration plan must accompany the business continuity plan.  Some enterprises may want to utilize regionally diverse data centers that mirror each other but this is also expensive and exceptionally complex to implement – though it can be very effective at maintaining uptime, maximizing security, and optimizing business continuity.

As mentioned, redundancy is an important part of maximizing uptime and maintaining business continuity in a data center. As part of your data center’s business continuity plan, you may want to implement load balancing and link load balancing.  Server load balancing and link load balancing are two strategies that may be used to help prevent the loss of data from an overload or outage in a data center. Continuity Central Archive explains how these two strategies can be used in data centers, “Server load balancing ensures application availability, facilitates tighter application integration, and intelligently and adaptively load balances user traffic based on a suite of application metrics and health checks. It also load balances IPS/IDS devices and composite IP-based applications, and distributes HTTP(S) traffic based on headers and SSL certificate fields. The primary function of server load balancing is to provide availability for applications running within traditional data centers, public cloud infrastructure or a private cloud. Should a server or other networking device become over-utilized or cease to function properly, the server load balancer redistributes traffic to healthy systems based on IT-defined parameters to ensure a seamless experience for end users…Link load balancing addresses WAN reliability by directing traffic to the best performing links. Should one link become inaccessible due to a bottleneck or outage, the ADC takes that link out of service, automatically directing traffic to other functioning links. Where server load balancing provides availability and business continuity for applications and infrastructure running within the data center, link load balancing ensures uninterrupted connectivity from the data center to the Internet and telecommunications networks. Link load balancing may be used to send traffic over whichever link or links prove to be most cost-effective for a given time period. What’s more, link load balancing may be used to direct select user groups and applications to specific links to ensure bandwidth and availability for business critical functions.”

Cloud computing flowchart with businessman

In addition to the cloud, many data centers opt to implement image-based backup for continuity.  Data Center Knowledge provides a helpful description of what image-based backup is and how it can be used uniquely in data centers, “Hybrid, image-based backup is at the core of successful business continuity solutions today. A hybrid solution combines the quick restoration benefits of local backup with the off-site, economic advantages of a cloud resource. Data is first copied and stored on a local device, so that enterprises can do fast and easy restores from that device. At the same time, the data is replicated in the cloud, creating off-site copies that don’t have to be moved physically. Channel partners are also helping enterprises make a critical shift from file-based backup to image-based. With file-based backup, the IT team chooses which files to back up, and only those files are saved. If the team overlooks an essential file and a disaster occurs, that file is gone. With image-based backup, the enterprise can capture an image of the data in its environment. You can get exact replications of what is stored on a server — including the operating system, configurations and settings, and preferences. Make sure to look for a solution that automatically saves each image-based backup as a virtual machine disk (VMDK), both in the local device and the cloud. This will ensure a faster virtualization process.”

While not every data center will experience a “major” disaster where they cannot get into their facility for weeks, many data centers will experience some type of disaster.  And, as mentioned, mere minutes can cost tens of thousands of dollars.  Beyond the bottom line, the inability to continuously maintain data center business may damage your reputation irreparably.  An effective business continuity plan is capable of pivoting around both people and processes depending on the specific circumstances.  Rapidly restoring data and operations is the goal and data centers should take that goal and work backwards from there to determine the best path to maintaining business continuity.

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Develop a Business Continuity Plan

Streamline the traditional approach to make bcp development manageable and repeatable..

  • Recent crises have increased executive awareness and internal pressure to create a business continuity plan (BCP).
  • Industry and government-driven regulations require evidence of sound business continuity practices.
  • Customers demand their vendors provide evidence of a workable BCP prior to signing a contract.

IT leaders, because of their cross-functional view and experience with incident management and DR, are often asked to lead BCP efforts.

Critical Insight

  • BCP requires input from multiple departments with different and sometimes conflicting objectives. There are typically few, if any, dedicated resources for BCP, so it can't be a full-time, resource-intensive project.
  • As an IT leader you have the skill set and organizational knowledge to lead a BCP project, but ultimately business leaders need to own the BCP – they know their processes, and therefore, their requirements to resume business operations better than anyone else.
  • The traditional approach to BCP is a massive project that most organizations can’t execute without hiring a consultant. To execute BCP in-house, carve up the task into manageable pieces as outlined in this blueprint.

Impact and Result

  • Implement a structured and repeatable process that you apply to one business unit at a time to keep BCP planning efforts manageable.
  • Use the results of the pilot to identify gaps in your recovery plans and reduce overall continuity risk while continuing to assess specific risks as you repeat the process with additional business units.
  • Enable business leaders to own the BCP going forward. Develop a template that the rest of the organization can use.
  • Leverage BCP outcomes to refine IT DRP recovery objectives and achieve DRP-BCP alignment.

Develop a Business Continuity Plan Research & Tools

Start here – read the executive brief.

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop a business continuity plan, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

1. Identify BCP maturity and document process dependencies

Assess current maturity, establish a team, and choose a pilot business unit. Identify business processes, dependencies, and alternatives.

2. Conduct a BIA to determine acceptable RTOs and RPOs

Define an objective impact scoring scale, estimate the impact of downtime, and set recovery targets.

3. Document the recovery workflow and projects to close gaps

Build a workflow of the current steps for business recovery. Identify gaps and risks to recovery. Brainstorm and prioritize solutions to address gaps and mitigate risks.

4. Extend the results of the pilot BCP and implement governance

Present pilot project results and next steps. Create BCMS teams. Update and maintain BCMS documentation.

5. Appendix: Additional BCP tools and templates

Use these tools and templates to assist in the creation of your BCP.

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Valley Strong Credit Union

Dave was amazing. This workshop did not seem like a class because Dave made it fun and very interesting. We learned a lot. He took the time to exp... Read More

Dave was amazing. This workshop did not seem like a class because Dave made it fun and very interesting. We learned a lot. He took the time to explain everything he could regarding BCP in a very clear way. Some of us have a lot of experience with BCP and others do not, so he kept that in mind thru the workshop. This workshop was very beneficial to help us mature our BCP. The after-workshop deliverables from Dave were very helpful and will help us continue our BCP for years to come. Honestly, the “worst part” of the workshop was having it end. Read Less

AgWest Farm Credit, FLCA

Independent Health

Frank's ability to facilitate the exercise effectively helped our team gain valuable knowledge about contingency strategies that should be implemen... Read More

Frank's ability to facilitate the exercise effectively helped our team gain valuable knowledge about contingency strategies that should be implemented. Read Less

MyPath, Inc.

The Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority

The entire workshop led by Dave was fantastic. There were no parts of the experience that were worse per se, with the exception of the length of ti... Read More

The entire workshop led by Dave was fantastic. There were no parts of the experience that were worse per se, with the exception of the length of time the workshop took. However, we needed that time and more to get through everything. The deliverables and lessons learned will help us to continue building our business continuity management system. Lastly, please note that I left the financial impact at N/A as it's too early to estimate how much the tools and advice will save us. Read Less

Mutual Benefit Group

Benedict did a great job explaining your research and tools as well as options for us to move forward. I don't feel there was a 'worst' part of our... Read More

Benedict did a great job explaining your research and tools as well as options for us to move forward. I don't feel there was a 'worst' part of our first call. Read Less

Incharge Debt Solutions

Burke and Herbert Bank and Trust Company

There were no bad parts. Frank worked well with us on prep for the workshop and all expectations were met

The overall experience.

Community Health Choice, Inc.

The best part was the expertise Frank provided on the subject and how the InfoTech tools can be seamless integrated into the work already done. No ... Read More

The best part was the expertise Frank provided on the subject and how the InfoTech tools can be seamless integrated into the work already done. No worst part noted. Read Less

The knowledge of Frank (InfoTech) was outstanding. I have nothing negative to say about the experience.

Coachella Valley Water District

Sumit is very knowledgeable on the BCP subject. His workshop delivery skills are outstanding. He was able to explain the concepts extremely well. T... Read More

Sumit is very knowledgeable on the BCP subject. His workshop delivery skills are outstanding. He was able to explain the concepts extremely well. The workshop was well organized, and the participants were very pleased. Great job, Sumit! Read Less

Colonial Savings, F.A.

I was a pleasure working with Darin. He definitely helped point us in the right direction. I would highly recommend him to others and would look fo... Read More

I was a pleasure working with Darin. He definitely helped point us in the right direction. I would highly recommend him to others and would look forward to working with him in the future. It is difficult to measure the dollar impact. Read Less

Auckland Transport

For the purposes of question 3, we didn't have a budget, so I cannot estimate the savings in $. There were no 'worst' parts of my experience. The... Read More

For the purposes of question 3, we didn't have a budget, so I cannot estimate the savings in $. There were no 'worst' parts of my experience. The level of service and professionalism of Infotech and the Account Manager and Research Director is outstanding. The tools provided by Infotech are well thought out and provide a great springboard for business continuity management and gave me the opportunity to reflect on my knowledge of BC as a practice and how I might simplify or update my approach to the Business Impact Analysis. Having the Infotech team there to support me and explain the tools and the thinking behind the development of the tools has been invaluable, and I am grateful that our organisation has an Infotech subscription to be able to leverage these great tools and the Infotech Team. It was good to speak to a professional with knowledge for and qualifications for BC, to be able to bounce ideas off, get any advice that he had about various challenges faced whilst implementing BC and be able to speak to somebody who understands BC practices. Thank you Infotech! And thanks go to our business technology department for my subscription to Infotech. Read Less

Avalon Health Care Management Inc.

I found the workshop beneficial is jump starting our business continuity. Best part was seeing the documents 'in action' and how they are valuabl... Read More

I found the workshop beneficial is jump starting our business continuity. Best part was seeing the documents 'in action' and how they are valuable. Prior to the workshop, I wasn't seeing the tools as beneficial to producing a Business Continuity plan to the company. Read Less

Great Clips Inc.

Best: The resources are incredibly helpful to jumpstart the process for us, and Andrew Sharp does a great job of leading us through the process and... Read More

Best: The resources are incredibly helpful to jumpstart the process for us, and Andrew Sharp does a great job of leading us through the process and answering our questions. I don't ever wrap up a conversation with him wondering what I should do next. Worst: Transitioning to a different analyst mid-stream - but we knew this would happen from day 1. I don't have any concerns with this change at this time. Read Less

WVU Foundation

We’ve done several of these workshops over the years, they’re always very good. As one of our folks said “without the workshop we would never talk ... Read More

We’ve done several of these workshops over the years, they’re always very good. As one of our folks said “without the workshop we would never talk about these issues!” The only negative comment I have is they take a lot of time! But again, we would never spend time on these important issues if we didn’t have the workshops!! Read Less

OnPoint Group, LLC

Sumit has been a PHENOMINAL facilitator for all 5 of our workshops (this was our 5th with him). He is prepared, picks up on the business context, a... Read More

Sumit has been a PHENOMINAL facilitator for all 5 of our workshops (this was our 5th with him). He is prepared, picks up on the business context, and always seems to be asking the right question. He also changes the conversation from "do I have to do this?" to "wow, I'm really glad we did this" when talking with the operations side of the business. Read Less

eGov Jamaica Ltd.

Municipality of Chatham-Kent

The engagement was cut short due to resourcing issues on our end. Andrew was great and provided valuable insight. I hope to take this back up in ... Read More

The engagement was cut short due to resourcing issues on our end. Andrew was great and provided valuable insight. I hope to take this back up in the fall. Read Less

Alabama Department Of Human Resources

Andrew Sharp is very knowledgeable and he has provided great guidance in improving our Business Continuity Plan.

Eswatini Railway

We are very impressed with the expert guidance and proficiency of the Infotech SME who was able to work with us on the DRP and BCP for the organiza... Read More

We are very impressed with the expert guidance and proficiency of the Infotech SME who was able to work with us on the DRP and BCP for the organization. The excellent tools and templates from infotech have helped us put together DRP and BCP plans we can rely on to mitigate the impact of a disaster, no matter its source. Read Less

Dedicating the time to conduct this exercise in a concentrated manner was difficult, but Sumit provided strong focus and an appropriate amount of f... Read More

Dedicating the time to conduct this exercise in a concentrated manner was difficult, but Sumit provided strong focus and an appropriate amount of flexibility - great balance. Read Less

National Arts Centre Canada

It was great to have a very knowledgeable person to talk to about BCPs.

Corix Infrastructure Inc.

Catholic Health System

Business Continuity

Streamline the traditional approach to make BCP development manageable and repeatable. This course makes up part of the Security & Risk Certificate.

Now Playing: Academy: Business Continuity | Executive Brief

  • Course Modules: 5
  • Estimated Completion Time: 2-2.5 hours
  • Featured Analysts:
  • Frank Trovato, Research Director, Infrastructure Practice
  • Eric Wright, SVP of Research and Advisory

Workshop: Develop a Business Continuity Plan

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Define BCP Scope, Objectives, and Stakeholders

The purpose.

Define BCP scope, objectives, and stakeholders.

Key Benefits Achieved

Prioritize BCP efforts and level-set scope with key stakeholders.

Assess current BCP maturity.

  • BCP Maturity Scorecard: measure progress and identify gaps.

Identify key business processes to include in scope.

Flowchart key business processes to identify business processes, dependencies, and alternatives.

  • Business process flowcharts: review, optimize, and allow for knowledge transfer of processes.
  • Identify workarounds for common disruptions to day-to-day continuity.

Module 2: Define RTOs and RPOs Based on Your BIA

Define RTOs and RPOs based on your BIA.

Set recovery targets based business impact, and illustrate the importance of BCP efforts via the impact of downtime.

Define an objective scoring scale to indicate different levels of impact.

  • BCP Business Impact Analysis: objective scoring scale to assess cost, goodwill, compliance, and safety impacts.

Estimate the impact of downtime.

  • Apply the scoring scale to estimate the impact of downtime on business processes.

Determine acceptable RTO/RPO targets for business processes based on business impact.

  • Acceptable RTOs/RPOs to dictate recovery strategy.

Module 3: Create a Recovery Workflow

Create a recovery workflow.

Build an actionable, high-level, recovery workflow that can be adapted to a variety of different scenarios.

Conduct a tabletop exercise to determine current recovery procedures.

  • Recovery flow diagram – current and future state
  • Identify gaps and recovery risks.

Identify and prioritize projects to close gaps and mitigate recovery risks.

  • Create a project roadmap to close gaps.

Evaluate options for command centers and alternate business locations (i.e. BC site).

  • Evaluate requirements for alternate business sites.

Module 4: Extend the Results of the Pilot BCP and Implement Governance

Extend the results of the pilot BCP and implement governance.

Outline the actions required for the rest of your BCMS, and the required effort to complete those actions, based on the results of the pilot.

Summarize the accomplishments and required next steps to create an overall BCP.

  • Pilot BCP Executive Presentation

Identify required BCM roles.

  • Business Continuity Team Roles & Responsibilities

Create a plan to update and maintain your overall BCP.

  • 3. Maintenance plan and BCP templates to complete the relevant documentation (BC Policy, BCP Action Items, Recovery Workflow, etc.)

Analyst Perspective

A bcp touches every aspect of your organization, making it potentially the most complex project you’ll take on. streamline this effort or you won’t get far..

None of us needs to look very far to find a reason to have an effective business continuity plan.

From pandemics to natural disasters to supply chain disruptions to IT outages, there’s no shortage of events that can disrupt your complex and interconnected business processes. How in the world can anyone build a plan to address all these threats?

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Use these tactics to streamline your BCP project and stay on track:

  • Focus on one business unit at a time. Keep the effort manageable, establish a repeatable process, and produce deliverables that provide a starting point for the rest of the organization.
  • Don’t start with an extensive risk analysis. It takes too long and at the end you’ll still need a plan to resume business operations following a disruption. Rather than trying to predict what could cause a disruption, focus on how to recover.
  • Keep your BCP documentation concise. Use flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams instead of traditional manuals.

No one can predict every possible disruption, but by following the guidance in this blueprint, you can build a flexible continuity plan that allows you to withstand the threats your organization may face.

Frank Trovato

Research Director, IT Infrastructure & Operations Practice Info-Tech Research Group

Andrew Sharp

Senior Research Analyst, IT Infrastructure & Operations Practice Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your challenge.

  • Recent crises have increased executive awareness and internal pressure to create a BCP.
  • Industry- and government-driven regulations require evidence of sound business continuity practices.

Common Obstacles

  • IT managers asked to lead BCP efforts are dealing with processes and requirements beyond IT and outside of their control.
  • BCP requires input from multiple departments with different and sometimes conflicting objectives.
  • Typically there are few, if any, dedicated resources for BCP, so it can't be a full-time, resource-intensive project.

Info-Tech’s Approach

  • Focus on implementing a structured and repeatable process that can be applied to one business unit at a time to avoid BCP from becoming an overwhelming project.
  • Enable business leaders to own the BCP going forward by establishing a template that the rest of the organization can follow.

Info-Tech Insight

As an IT leader you have the skill set and organizational knowledge to lead a BCP project, but you must enable business leaders to own their department’s BCP practices and outputs . They know their processes and, therefore, their requirements to resume business operations better than anyone else.

Use this research to create business unit BCPs and structure your overall BCP

A business continuity plan (BCP) consists of separate but related sub-plans, as illustrated below. This blueprint enables you to:

  • Develop a BCP for a selected business unit (as a pilot project), and thereby establish a methodology that can be repeated for remaining business units.
  • Through the BCP process, clarify requirements for an IT disaster recovery plan (DRP). Refer to Info-Tech’s Disaster Recovery Planning workshop for instructions on how to create an IT DRP.
  • Implement ongoing business continuity management to govern BCP, DRP, and crisis management.

Overall Business Continuity Plan

It disaster recovery plan.

A plan to restore IT application and infrastructure services following a disruption.

Info-Tech’s disaster recovery planning blueprint provides a methodology for creating the IT DRP. Leverage this blueprint to validate and provide inputs for your IT DRP.

BCP for Each Business Unit

A set of plans to resume business processes for each business unit. This includes:

  • Identifying business processes and dependencies.
  • Defining an acceptable recovery timeline based on a business impact analysis.
  • Creating a step-by-step recovery workflow.

Crisis Management Plan

A plan to manage a wide range of crises, from health and safety incidents to business disruptions to reputational damage.

Info-Tech’s Implement Crisis Management Best Practices blueprint provides a framework for planning a response to any crisis, from health and safety incidents to reputational damage.

IT leaders asked to develop a BCP should start with an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

It’s a business continuity plan. why should you start continuity planning with it.

  • IT services are a critical dependency for most business processes. Creating an IT DRP helps you mitigate a key risk to continuity quicker than it takes to complete your overall BCP, and you can then focus on other dependencies such as people, facilities, and suppliers.
  • A BCP requires workarounds for IT failures. But it’s difficult to plan workarounds without a clear understanding of the potential IT downtime and data loss. Your DRP will answer those questions, and without a DRP, BCP discussions can get bogged down in IT discussions. Think of payroll as an example: if downtime might be 24 hours, the business might simply wait for recovery; if downtime might be a week, waiting it out is not an option.
  • As an IT manager, you can develop an IT DRP primarily with resources within your control. That makes it an easier starting point and puts IT in a better position to shift responsibility for BCP to business leaders (where it should reside) since essentially the IT portion is done.

Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan today.

Modernize the bcp, if your bcp relies heavily on paper-based processes as workarounds, it’s time to update your plan..

Back when transactions were recorded on paper and then keyed into the mainframe system later, it was easier to revert to deskside processes. There is very little in the way of paper-based processes anymore, and as a result, it is increasingly difficult to resume business processes without IT.

Think about your own organization. What IT system(s) are absolutely critical to business operations? While you might be able to continue doing business without IT, this requires regular preparation and training. It’s likely a completely offline process and won’t be a viable workaround for long even if staff know how to do the work. If your data center and core systems are down, technology-enabled workarounds (such as collaboration via mobile technologies or cloud-based solutions) could help you weather the outage, and may be more flexible and adaptable for day-to-day work.

The bottom line:

Technology is a critical dependency for business processes. Consider the role IT systems play as process dependencies and as workarounds as part of continuity planning.

Info-Tech’s approach

The traditional approach to bcp takes too long and produces a plan that is difficult to use and maintain., the problem: you need to create a bcp, but don’t know where to start..

  • BCP is being demanded more and more to comply with regulations, mitigate business risk, meet customer demands, and obtain insurance.
  • IT leaders are often asked to lead BCP.

The Complication: A traditional BCP process takes longer to show value.

  • Traditional consultants don’t usually have an incentive to accelerate the process.
  • At the same time, self-directed projects with no defined process go months without producing useful deliverables.
  • The result is a dense manual that checks boxes but isn’t maintainable or usable in a crisis.

A pie chart is separated into three segments, Internal Mandates 43%, Customer Demands 23%, and Regulatory Requirements 34%. The bottom of the image reads Source: Info-Tech Research Group.

The Info-Tech difference:

Use info-tech’s methodology to right-size and streamline the process..

  • Reduce required effort . Keep the work manageable and maintain momentum by focusing on one business unit at a time; allow that unit to own their BCP.
  • Prioritize your effort . Evaluate the current state of your BCP to identify the steps that are most in need of attention.
  • Get valuable results faster. Functional deliverables and insights from the first business unit’s BCP can be leveraged by the entire organization (e.g. communication, assessment, and BC site strategies).

Expedite BCP development

Info-tech’s approach to bcp:.

  • Start with one critical business unit to manage scope, establish a repeatable process, and generate deliverables that become a template for remaining business units.
  • Resolve critical gaps as you identify them, generating early value and risk mitigation.
  • Create concise, practical documentation to support recovery.

Embed training and awareness throughout the planning process.

BCP for Business Unit A:

Scope → Pilot BIA → Response Plan → Gap Analysis

→ Lessons Learned:

  • Leverage early results to establish a BCM framework.
  • Take action to resolve critical gaps as they are identified.
  • BCP for Business Units B through N.
  • Scope→BIA→Response Plan→Gap Analysis

= Ongoing governance, testing, maintenance, improvement, awareness, and training.

By comparison, a traditional BCP approach takes much longer to mitigate risk:

  • An extensive, upfront commitment of time and resources before defining incident response plans and mitigating risk.
  • A “big bang” approach that makes it difficult to predict the required resourcing and timelines for the project.

Organizational Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis → Solution Design to Achieve Recovery Objectives → Create and Validate Response Plans

Continuity Planning Supports COVID-19 Response

Industry: non-profit source: info-tech advisory services.

A charitable foundation for a major state university engaged Info-Tech to support the creation of their business continuity plan.

With support from Info-Tech analysts and the tools in this blueprint, they worked with their business unit stakeholders to identify recovery objectives, confirm recovery capabilities and business process workarounds, and address gaps in their continuity plans.

The outcome wasn’t a pandemic plan – it was a continuity plan that was applicable to pandemics. And it worked. Business processes were prioritized, gaps in work-from-home and business process workarounds had been identified and addressed, business leaders owned their plan and understood their role in it, and IT had clear requirements that they were able and ready to support.

“The work you did here with us was beyond valuable! I wish I could actually explain how ready we really were for this…while not necessarily for a pandemic, we were ready to spring into action, set things up, the priorities were established, and most importantly some of the changes we’ve made over the past few years helped beyond words! The fact that the groups had talked about this previously almost made what we had to do easy.“ -- VP IT Infrastructure

Download the BCP Case Study

Project Overview: BCP

Blueprint deliverables.

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

BCP Business Impact Analysis Tool : Conduct and document a business impact analysis using this document.

BCP Recovery Workflows Example: Model your own recovery workflows on this example.

BCP Project Roadmap: Use this tool to prioritize projects that can improve BCP capabilities and mitigate gaps and risks.

BCP Relocation Checklists: Plan for and manage a site relocation – whether to an alternate site or work from home.

Key deliverable:

Bcp summary document.

Summarize your organization's continuity capabilities and objectives in a 15-page, easy-to-consume template.

This document consolidates data from the supporting documentation and tools to the right.

Download Info-Tech’s BCP Summary Document

Insight summary

Focus less on risk, and more on recovery

Avoid focusing on risk and probability analysis to drive your continuity strategy. You never know what might disrupt your business, so develop a flexible plan to enable business resumption regardless of the event.

Small teams = good pilots

Choose a small team for your BCP pilot. Small teams are better at trialing new techniques and finding new ways to think about problems.

Calculate downtime impact

Develop and apply a scoring scale to develop a more-objective assessment of downtime impact for the organization. This will help you prioritize recovery.

It’s not no, but rather not now…

You can’t address all the organization’s continuity challenges at once. Prioritize high value, low effort initiatives and create a long-term roadmap for the rest.

Show Value Now

Get to value quickly. Start with one business unit with continuity challenges, and a small, focused project team who can rapidly learn the methodology, identify continuity gaps, and define solutions that can also be leveraged by other departments right away.

Lightweight Testing Exercises

Outline recovery capabilities using lightweight, low risk tabletop planning exercises . Our research shows tabletop exercises increase confidence in recovery capabilities almost as much as live exercises, which carry much higher costs and risks.

Blueprint benefits

Demonstrate compliance with demands from regulators and customers.

  • Develop a plan that satisfies auditors, customers, and insurance providers who demand proof of a continuity plan.
  • Demonstrate commitment to resilience by identifying gaps in current capabilities and projects to overcome those gaps.
  • Empower business users to develop their plans and perform regular maintenance to ensure plans don’t go stale.
  • Establish a culture of business readiness and resilience.

Leverage your BCP to drive value (Business Benefits)

  • Enable flexible, mobile, and adaptable business operations that can overcome disruptions large and small. This includes making it easier to work remotely in response to pandemics or facility disruptions.
  • Clarify the risk of the status quo to business leaders so they can make informed decisions on where to invest in business continuity.
  • Demonstrate to customers your ability to overcome disruptions and continue to deliver your services.

Info-Tech Advisory Services lead to Measurable Value

Info-Tech members told us they save an average of $44,522 and 23 days by working with an Info-Tech analyst on BCP (source: client response data from Info-Tech's Measured Value Survey ).

Why do members report value from analyst engagement?

  • Expert advice on your specific situation to overcome obstacles and speed bumps.
  • Structure the project and stay on track.
  • Review project deliverables and ensure the process is applied properly.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Diy toolkit.

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostic and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Your Trusted Advisor is a call away.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is between eight to twelve calls over the course of four to six months.

  • Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and stakeholders. Identify a pilot BCP project.

Business Processes and Dependencies

Calls 2 - 4: Assess current BCP maturity. Create business process workflows, dependencies, alternates, and workarounds.

Conduct a BIA

Calls 5 – 7: Create an impact scoring scale and conduct a BIA. Identify acceptable RTO and RPO.

Recovery Workflow

Calls 8 – 9: Create a recovery workflow based on tabletop planning.

Documentation & BCP Framework

Call 10: Summarize the pilot results and plan next steps. Define roles and responsibilities. Make the case for a wider BCP program.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.

[email protected] | 1-888-670-8889

Identify BCP Maturity and Document Process Dependencies

1.1 Assess Current BCP Maturity

1.2 Establish the pilot BCP team

1.3 Identify business processes, dependencies, and alternatives

Insights & Outcomes

Define the scope for the BCP project: assess the current state of the plan, create a pilot project team and pilot project charter, and map the business processes that will be the focus of the pilot.

Participants

  • BCP Coordinator
  • BCP Executive Sponsor
  • Pilot Business Unit Manager & Process SMEs

Assess current BCP Maturity

This step will walk you through the following activities:

  • Complete Info-Tech’s BCP Maturity Scorecard

This step involves the following participants:

  • Executive Sponsor

You'll use the following tools & templates :

  • BCP Maturity Scorecard

Outcomes & Insights

Establish current BCP maturity using Info-Tech’s ISO 22301-aligned BCP Maturity Scorecard.

Evaluate the current state of your continuity plan

Use info-tech’s maturity scorecard to structure and accelerate a bcp maturity assessment., conduct a maturity assessment to:.

  • Create a baseline metric so you can measure progress over time. This metric can also drive buy-in from senior management to invest time and effort into your BCP.
  • Understand the scope of work to create a complete business continuity plan.
  • Measure your progress and remaining gaps by updating your assessment once you’ve completed the activities in this blueprint.

This blueprint primarily addresses the first four sections in the scorecard, which align with the creation of the core components of your business continuity plan.

Info-Tech’s BCP Maturity Scorecard

Info-Tech’s maturity scorecard is aligned with ISO 22301, the international standard that describes the key elements of a functioning business continuity management system or program – the overarching set of documents, practices, and controls that support the ongoing creation and maintenance of your BCP. A fully functional BCMS goes beyond business continuity planning to include crisis management , BCP testing, and documentation management .

Audit tools tend to treat every bullet point in ISO 22301 as a separate requirement – which means there’s almost 400 lines to assess. Info-Tech’s BCP Maturity Scorecard has synthesized key requirements, minimizing repetition to create a high-level self-assessment aligned with the standard.

A high score is a good indicator of likely success with an audit.

Download Info-Tech's BCP Maturity Scorecard

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

MEMBER RATING

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

Read what our members are saying

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Need Extra Help? Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 5-phase advisory process. You'll receive 5 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Scoping

Guided implementation 2: business processes and dependencies.

  • Call 1: Assess current BCP maturity. Create business process workflows, dependencies, alternates, and workarounds.

Guided Implementation 3: Conduct a BIA

  • Call 1: Create an impact scoring scale and conduct a BIA. Identify acceptable RTO and RPO.

Guided Implementation 4: Recovery Workflow

  • Call 1: Create a recovery workflow based on tabletop planning.

Guided Implementation 5: Documentation & BCP Framework

  • Call 1: Summarize the pilot results and plan next steps. Define roles and responsibilities. Make the case for a wider BCP program.

Contributors

  • Dr. Bernard A. Jones, MBCI, CBCP, Berkeley College
  • Kris Roberson, Disaster Recovery Analyst, Veterans United Home Loans
  • Trevor Butler, General Manager of Information Technology, City of Lethbridge
  • Robert Miller, Information Services Director, Witt/Kieffer

Related Content: DR and Business Continuity

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Search Code: 46076 Last Revised: October 6, 2020

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The Key Components of a Business Continuity Plan

You have a great disaster recovery (DR) plan , and Zerto has helped simplify that even more by allowing your IT organization to consolidate multiple point products with a single, simple, and scalable solution. You have freed up valuable time for your IT operations teams to deliver more innovation as your business transforms. You have adopted the cloud for multiple applications – maybe you’ve moved away from the data center management business and are fully capable of DR to the public cloud – but has your business continuity plan (BCP) evolved alongside your DR plan to ensure holistic success in the event of an unplanned disruption? Even if you can have all those workloads recovered in the cloud or on-premises within minutes, the business operations side needs to be ready to shift in order to mitigate the downtime.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning

According to ISO 22301, a business continuity plan is defined as “documented procedures that guide organizations to R espond, R ecover, R esume, and R estore to a pre-defined level of operations following disruption.” Disaster recovery is a subset of the overall BCP because, without your data, you are at the mercy of whatever disruption found its way into your datacenter. At Zerto, we create software that, at its core, delivers industry-leading recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) , minimizing data loss and disruption time. We also go the extra mile and provide your business with orchestration, automation, and visibility – to help you meet the “ four R’s ” above and bridge the gap between disaster recovery and business continuity .

Having a business continuity plan in place is important because once IT has recovered the downed systems, the team responsible for executing the BCP must initiate their plan to bring operations back up as quickly as possible. Every minute counts. For every minute the business is down, there is revenue loss, brand impact, dissatisfied customers, lost productivity, and much more. So, what exactly is involved in a business continuity plan?

6 Key Components of a Business Continuity Plan

In the previous section, I mentioned that communication during a disruption is one vital aspect of a sound business continuity plan. Before a disaster was declared, there would have been key criteria and triggers before initiating the plan, so we’re off to a good start! Let’s take a closer look at several other critical components of a business continuity plan necessary for successful recovery in the event of an unplanned disruption.

Contact Information and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

The first component of a business continuity plan is contact information along with SLAs. You will need to identify the following:

  • Stakeholders
  • Key personnel
  • Backup site operators
  • Providers (equipment, services)
  • Emergency responders
  • Third-party vendors
  • Facilities managers
  • Incident response team(s)
  • Successors in case key personnel are unavailable or become overwhelmed
  • Additional critical third-party personnel

Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

A business impact analysis (BIA) will help you identify and predict business disruption consequences and enable you to gather information to develop recovery strategies. Here are some examples of what may be covered in a business impact analysis:

  • An understanding of the changes introduced during unplanned disruption
  • Legal or regulatory repercussions of unplanned disruption
  • Inventory of all business units required for continuity of operations
  • Key personnel as well as staff required to support that personnel
  • Pre/post-disruption dependencies
  • Validation of test plan
  • Ranking of priorities & order of operations
  • Revenue loss
  • Customer service
  • Brand/reputation damage
  • Identify acceptable RTO
  • Identify an acceptable amount of data loss RPO to minimize the overall impact on the business
  • Recovery strategy

Risk Assessment

Risk assessment is the process of identifying, understanding and evaluating the potential risks to all aspects of an organization’s operations. Here are some examples:

Hazard Identification – Probability and Magnitude

  • Natural Disasters
  • Utility Outage
  • Cyber Attack

Assets at Risk – Vulnerability Assessment

  • Property (buildings, critical I=infrastructure)
  • Supply chain
  • Systems/equipment
  • Business operations
  • Regulatory and contractual obligations
  • Environment

Impact Analysis

  • Property damage
  • Business interruption
  • Loss of customers
  • Financial loss
  • Environmental contamination
  • Fines and penalties

Identify Critical Functions

Identification of critical functions will reveal what processes are critical to maintaining and running a business in the event of an unplanned disruption. You want to identify your business critical priorities and focus recovery efforts there first. These include but are not limited to:

  • Payroll and time tracking
  • Revenue operations
  • Physical security
  • Information security
  • Core business functions
  • Data protection after recovery
  • Identity & access management

Communications

When an unplanned disruption occurs, communication with employees, shareholders, users, customers, and key personnel is critical. Human resource professionals can play a crucial role in ensuring consistent and timely communication between the organizational recovery efforts and staff. When customers are involved, social media has become a vital tool to provide timely updates, as many users turn to social media when incidents arise.

  • What is your crisis communication strategy?
  • Communication during an event is key to orchestrate personnel, providers, and third-party vendors if required.

Having a plan is one thing, but testing and practicing it is imperative. Having an inadequate plan is about as good as not having a plan at all. It is vital to develop a strategy to routinely test , and test often, to identify gaps in your plan and anticipate any changes along the way.

Having a working test plan will help you:

  • Identify gaps or weaknesses in your BCP
  • Evaluate the organization’s response to different types of disruptive events
  • Improve systems and processes based on your test results
  • Confirm that your continuity objectives can be successfully executed against and met
  • Update your plan along the way
  • Document lessons learned

In conclusion

We understand that unplanned disruptions do not just affect IT operations. They have a domino effect on your entire business! As digital transformation is in full gear, your reliance on technology to remain visible to the world steadily increases. Currently, we find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic; the Atlantic hurricane season is just kicking off, wildfire season is on the horizon, and cyber-attacks are steadily increasing. Is your business prepared? We need to be more proactive than ever when it comes to DR and BCP; in fact, the two strategies should overlap, and both teams on the field should be playing together toward a common goal – resilience .

Learn more key considerations and where modern IT enterprises are heading in the IDC report, “The State of Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Readiness: 2022” .

business continuity plan in data center

Gene Torres is a Technology Evangelist at Zerto with 21 years of experience as an IT Professional focusing on data center virtualization and resilience. Prior to Zerto, Gene was a Solutions Engineer before advancing to Enterprise Architect. He lives in Tacoma, WA with his wife, Rhea, and 3 daughters. He maintains his own technology-focused blog as an active vExpert and enjoys gaming, barbecue, and spending time outdoors.

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Keppel Data Centres (Keppel DC)

Business Continuity Planning

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Disaster recovery facilities and services to ensure the continuity of mission-critical IT systems

Data centres and disaster recovery spaces are important to all businesses, big or small. We understand the critical role that our data centres play in delivering critical support and are committed to work with you on your business continuity plans (BCP) and disaster recovery efforts.

Leveraging our quality facilities and robust services, we strive to support our customers in achieving continuous operations with minimal downtime.

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Benefits of Business Continuity Planning with Keppel Data Centres:

  • Provision of offsite BCP locations within a secure environment for uninterrupted operations
  • Comprehensive, tested and proven disaster recovery plans for all sites
  • Updated precautionary measures and compliance protocols align with regulatory guidelines

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  • Business Continuity Plans for Data Centers

Jan 7, 2024 | Uncategorized

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The importance of data centers in supporting business operations cannot be overstated. They act as the nerve centers that handle, process, and store critical data, making them an integral component of any modern business. However, what happens when disaster strikes, causing a power outage and disrupting your data center’s capabilities? This is where a comprehensive business continuity plan comes into play, ensuring that your business operations carry on with little to no interruption.

At the heart of any robust business continuity plan lies a carefully designed strategy for protecting data centers — an area where the unexpected is always lying in wait. This raises the crucial question: does your enterprise have a comprehensive data center business continuity plan in place to safeguard your critical systems and business operations during unexpected events?

Understanding this need and as a part of our commitment to ensuring business continuity, we at Flagship SG are drawing from our deep industry experience and expertise to guide you in developing a comprehensive business continuity plan for data centers. Specialized in data center managed services, we not only help businesses respond effectively to disasters but also go a step ahead by offering business continuity management, endpoint management, and backup and disaster recovery. 

Backed by risk assessment and business impact analysis, we’ll walk you through how to create a business continuity plan that addresses your unique needs, both big and small. Our ultimate goal? To help you understand how a carefully crafted plan can facilitate quick recovery, minimize data loss, and ensure customer satisfaction during a disruptive event, safeguarding your business’s future growth and success. 

Understanding the Fundamentals of a Data Center Business Continuity Plan 

The crisis is an inevitable part of the business landscape, whether in the form of a mere power outage or a large-scale natural disaster. However, the key to ensuring a business’s survival in the unpredictable digital age involves understanding the core components of a data center business continuity plan and how it aids the uninterrupted flow of critical operations. 

A data center business continuity plan (BCP) is a series of protocols and procedures designed to enable businesses to continue operating during a disruptive event and to recover swiftly afterward. The goal? To safeguard the critical functions that support and run your organization. At the heart of any BCP are two interconnected strategies: disaster recovery and business continuity.

Disaster recovery primarily focuses on a company’s IT infrastructure, data, and critical applications, outlining steps for recovering vital technology assets post a disaster. On the other hand, business continuity concentrates on keeping essential business operations running during a crisis and withstand a significant business disruption.

Formulating a robust BCP is far from a one-size-fits-all approach. It begins with an understanding of potential threats and potential risks specific to your business environment. This involves conducting a thorough risk assessment and laying out scenarios including, but not limited to, natural disasters, power outages, cyber-attacks, pandemic impacts, etc. 

The risk assessment, well complemented by a comprehensive business impact analysis, helps determine how these hazards can potentially impact your data center operations. While risk assessment identifies and assesses the potential risks, business impact analysis goes ahead to evaluate the possible aftereffects, enabling the business to prioritize recovery strategies effectively.

A business continuity plan should be imperative for every organization. It is about creating resilience and steadfastness in the face of adversity, positioning your business not only to survive but to continue thriving in the wake of potential threats. The next step? Developing your data center business continuity plan, an area where we at Flagship SG excel.

In the upcoming section, we delve into the specific strategies for developing a reliable and robust data center BCP to ensure your business stays resilient and operational, even in the face of seeming disaster.

How to Develop a Data Center Business Continuity Plan 

business continuity plan in data center

Building a sturdy Business Continuity Plan for your data center involves a multi-step process, anchored to the core objective of assuring uninterrupted business operations during unwanted disruptions.

At the onset of developing a BCP, your foremost consideration should be the elements that your business cannot afford to lose. In most cases, these are your critical systems that are responsible for delivering the most vital services. These systems prop up your business operations, hence, it is non-negotiable that they remain functional even during disaster scenarios.

Similar to critical systems, you should also identify your critical business processes, functions, assets, and applications. An in-depth understanding of these components is critical as it enables prioritization during the recovery process. This way, you can optimize resources and efforts to reinstate the most important operations first.

From this point, taking an approach grounded in best practices, you should begin to set clear objectives. Start by defining the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for your critical systems. 

The RTO is the amount of time your business can afford to be without a specific function or system before it starts affecting operations. 

The RPO, on the other hand, determines the maximum age of files you can recover from backup storage without causing significant harm to the continuity of operations.

As part of your plan, consider having a remote location as a secondary data center to ensure continuity during disruptive events. This involves transferring some of your critical business processes and systems to a different location, safely distanced from your primary data center.

Furthermore, be mindful of the regulatory requirements specific to your industry. Ensuring compliance with these standards as you build your BCP is crucial for safeguarding against legal repercussions.

The final piece of the puzzle includes being well-versed in disaster recovery solutions, an integral part of any business continuity plan. Incorporating load balancing and structuring your network architecture so that it supports continuity and disaster recovery should also be factored into your plan.

Implementation and Regular Analysis of the Business Continuity Plan 

Preparing a data center business continuity plan is only the beginning. The success and effectiveness of the plan depend on its execution and regular evaluation. Here’s how you can do it right.

Once you have identified your critical systems and established RTO and RPO, the plan should be implemented cohesively, focusing primarily on the aforementioned components. During this phase, setting up data replication protocols is vital. This process is the cornerstone of IT infrastructure, ensuring data from your primary site is continuously copied to another location. As a result, should a disaster occur, the replicated data will prevent data loss and minimize downtime.

Just having a plan isn’t enough, though. One must ensure that the plan works, in reality, to effectively navigate the troublesome tides of a disaster scenario. Disaster scenarios can be random and unanticipated, and your plan should be versatile enough to tackle various situations. This is why you should schedule regular simulations or drills. These activities test the plan under controlled conditions, enabling you to identify weaknesses and improve them before a disruptive event happens in reality.

Regularly revising and updating the plan is also crucial for its success. Changes in your business model, organizational structure, technology, or even regulatory requirements can impact your business continuity plan. To ensure your BCP continually meets its targeted objectives and remains aligned with any changes, periodic reviews, and updates are essential.

By conducting a thorough implementation coupled with regular checks on its robustness, your business continuity plan can truly become your organization’s safety shield. This shield will not only protect your operations amidst the storm of a disruptive event but also help clear the path for fast and efficient recovery.

How Flagship SG Can Support Your Data Center Business Continuity Plan 

After going through all the meticulous steps of not just developing, but also implementing and maintaining a business continuity plan, you may find yourself feeling overwhelmed. BCP is a complex process and can present an enormous challenge, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. That’s where we come in.

Flagship SG specializes in managed IT services, focusing on ensuring your business’s continuity and recovery. Our services are designed to not only complement your strategies but also to enhance them and equip your business with a robust defense mechanism against interruptions and potential disasters. 

Through our business continuity management services , we aim to ensure your workflow remains unhampered during a disruptive event. We allow you to focus on your core business operations while we handle the impact, recovery, and aftercare process. This is where our risk management, endpoint management, and backup & disaster recovery services play an indispensable role.   

Our data center-managed services endow you with the safety net of having experts manage your crucial IT systems, reducing the risk of severe downtime during a disaster. Our disaster recovery solution is focused on minimizing downtime by having a systematic approach in place to quickly restore lost data and get your systems up and running. 

We understand that every business has unique needs, and we focus on providing tailor-made services to meet these needs. Customer satisfaction is our main priority, and we commit to providing your business with the necessary system support and technology backup, to ensure any undesirable incident doesn’t significantly affect your operations. 

In conclusion, every business must develop, implement, and maintain a robust data center business continuity plan. Flagship SG , with its vast experience in this domain, is ready to assist you at every step of this process. Our commitment to your business continuity is unwavering, and we strive to offer services that help you maintain a resilient business posture in the face of unexpected disruptions. Together, we can ensure that your business not only weathers the storm but also emerges stronger, better, and more resilient.

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Data Centre Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans

Business continuity planning is essential for any organisation with IT operations, whether they run an on-premise server room, data centre or use off-premise Cloud facilities or a mixture of the two. Our business continuity planning service is a process that focuses on creating systems of prevention and recovery in order to deal with threats to an organisation, whether a private company or public sector body with the goal to enable ongoing operations no matter what the threat or disaster faced by the organisation.

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Data Centre Operations and Business Continuity Plans

A Business Continuity Plan ( BCP ) for a data centre or any other type of organisation with supplying a critical service or product is a documented plan to ensure the organisation can continue to provide the service or product during and after an emergency, disaster or threat. Examples include fire, power outages, flood and any other type that could be considered abnormal and impact operations.

Business continuity planning is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. In addition to prevention, the goal is to enable ongoing operations before and during execution of disaster recovery.

Our registered business continuity consultants and technical specialists have years of experience in the theory, design and practice of business and service continuity planning. From an initial discussion and data centre audit our consultants will prepare a business continuity plan for presentation that will be suitable for delivery to your team, board and/or investors.

Data Centre Disaster Recovery Plans

A Disaster Recovery Plan ( DRP ) is a subset of a business continuity plan. The DR plan is a documented approach with instructions on how to respond to unplanned incidents and involve restoring vital support systems including server facilities, IT assets, telecoms, and other critical infrastructure systems and data. The purpose of a disaster recovery plan is to minimise business and service downtime and getting technical operations back to normal running within the shortest possible time span.

Generally (according to Touche Ross), over 90% of businesses without a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan fail following a major incident.

As part of our data centre business continuity and disaster recovery services Server Room Environments provides:

Business Continuity Planning

  • Site audits and health checks
  • Business Impact Analysis ( BIA )
  • Risk Impact Analysis ( RIA )
  • Business continuity strategies, technical recovery objectives, salvage and disposals
  • Business plan audits and tests
  • Training and education services
  • Interim business continuity management

Business Continuity and Recovery Services

  • Disaster Recovery Planning ( DRP ) including backup and recovery
  • Mobile and Cloud DR Solutions
  • Work Area Recovery ( WAR )
  • High Availability Solution Architecture and Design, Development and Implementation for full end-2-end service and application delivery

Managed Continuity Services

  • Facilities Management and outsourcing
  • Administration and maintenance including strategic IT plans
  • Cloud backup and recovery Services

Crisis Management

  • Incident management systems
  • Crisis Management Teams ( CMT )
  • Emergency Recovery Teams
  • Regulatory Compliance

Industry Standards and Regulations Compliance Audits

Our consultants also provide advice, guidance and audits on regulatory standards and requirements for compliance.

  • ISO22301 (Business Continuity Management Standard)
  • ISO22313 (Societal Security)
  • ISO 27001 information security management systems ( ISMS )
  • Uptime Institute Operational Sustainability, with and without Tier certification
  • ANSI / BICSI 002-2014 Data Centre Design and Best Practice
  • AMS -IX – Amsterdam Internet Exchange – Data Centre Business Continuity Standard
  • ANSI / TIA 942-A 2014 Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard
  • EN50600 International Datacentre Standards
  • Best practice guidelines for PAS56 and PAS77
  • ITIL – IT Service Continuity Management ( ITSCM )
  • Sarbanes-Oxley ( SOX Compliance) and Basel II
  • LEED , Green Globes and Energy Star
  • PCI DSS Compliance

Please contact us for further information. Our business continuity and disaster recovery consultants operate globally both remotely and on-site and their experience covers SME server rooms with a small number of racks to public sector organisations and Tier-4 data centre operations for multi-national operations.

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Related FAQs

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How often should a disaster recovery plan be tested?

A disaster recovery plan should be tested annually at the very least. Ideally procedures should be audited and tested every 3 months. Non-conformances should be recorded and corrective and preventative actions taken to strengthen the plan.

What is DRaaS?

DRaaS stands for Disaster Recovery as a Service. The service uses an off-site storage and backup solution such as Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) or Azure Site Recovery to restore and organisation’s data and IT facility.

How is ISO22301 related to BS25999-Part 2?

ISO 22302 evolved from BS25999-Part 2 and provides a best-practice framework for an organisation to implement a Business Continuity Management System in order to minimise business disruption and continue operations during a major outage, incident or other type of emergency.

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There is a growing demand for bespoke on-site server rooms as many businesses implement a blend of office-based and remote working for their employees. Whilst some of these organisation’s applications have moved to the Cloud, they have locally based services that employees can only access through office-based servers.

The layout of your server room or datacentre facility will impact energy efficiency and operational costs. Even if the room is ideal in shape and size, how all your IT, power and cooling systems are arranged within the space must be optimised. So what are the key server room layout characteristics to consider when planning for a new facility, an upgrade or complete refurbishment?

Very often IT closets, computer and server rooms are overlooked when it comes to cooling and environment monitoring and yet they can experience rapid heat build-up. One of the biggest issues is deciding how to calculate the actual cooling requirements and then how best to deliver this into the relatively small and confined spaces.

Strengthening Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery with Colocation

The impacts of unanticipated downtime are intensifying as businesses increasingly rely on digital solutions to drive operations and work to elevate customer experiences to gain competitive edge. Disruptions impose significant costs that reach beyond stalled productivity to include noncompliance fines, declining customer satisfaction and brand reputation, and customer churn. 

According to ITIC ’s 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey, 44% of firms indicated that hourly downtime costs exceed $1 million and can reach to over $5 million, exclusive of legal fees, fines or penalties. Also, 91% of organizations said a single hour of downtime that takes mission-critical server hardware and applications offline averages over $300,000, due to lost business, productivity disruptions and remediation efforts. Only 1% of organizations – mainly very small businesses with 50 or fewer employees – estimate that an hour of downtime costs them less than $100,000 * . This makes business continuity (BC) plans and disaster recovery (DR) plans essential to every business, regardless of industry, revenue or size. The good news is that colocation can provide the foundation that supports the success of these plans.

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are closely aligned in their efforts to support the availability and resiliency of business operations. For this reason, BC and DR are often used interchangeably. However, they are not the same. BC encompasses the comprehensive scope of protocols and procedures identified to keep the enterprise running. DR is an element of a BC that focuses on safeguarding the integrity of IT infrastructure and data during a disaster. 

Together, BC and DR plans outline the steps and resources necessary to support a business’ people, processes, data and IT infrastructure to maintain business-as-usual operations during events that interferes with business operations. This can include natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and floods; human-caused disruptions resulting from errors or cyberattacks; and pandemics like COVID-19. 

BC and DR are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. DR is one element of a comprehensive business continuity plan.

Avoiding Disaster

Effective BC and DR plans are investments in success. Both plans require proactive assessment of the impact of various disaster scenarios and details on the steps to take before, during and after the event to minimize business interruptions. Documenting the plans in advance of a crisis is also crucial, because executing the required steps can be difficult under the stress of an emergency situation. Following predefined procedures can also improve the speed and precision of continuity and recovery efforts. 

The Business Continuity Plan

To help businesses manage unexpected events and minimize downtime, organizations must build a BC plan that supports their unique needs.  

Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis

Determining an organization’s specific BC needs begins with an intense evaluation of the environmental and infrastructure risks the business faces over the long-and short-term. For example, an organization with offices or IT infrastructure in a flood zone must determine how their location might increase risks to the business and make plans to enable continued operations. 

COVID-19 has spotlighted the challenges of supporting a distributed workforce. Not only do businesses need to adapt for a remote workforce, they need to account for the increased risk of cyberattacks as well as susceptibility to phishing, fraud and other threats that are more likely to succeed when employees are away from the office environment and the watchful eyes of IT administrators. 

It also became clear that finding alternate approaches to performing routine business tasks, delivering products and services to customers, and communicating with employees, vendors, partners and customers are paramount.

Plan Design  

Once equipped with a thorough understanding of the relevant risks and their business impacts, organizations can formulate the protocols and procedures needed to maintain operations. The plan should also identify key personnel, assign them specific roles and responsibilities and list all necessary actions. Each team member should receive proper training to ensure they are prepared to effectively execute their duties. The plan should also include a communication strategy, so that personnel can notify stakeholders of the event and keep them updated on the status of the situation. 

Testing and Ongoing Modifications

Testing is critical to validating their feasibility amid constantly evolving threats and business objectives. Changes to the plan might be as simple as updating contact information in the communication strategy or adding a new team member. Alternatively, a change could be more significant, for example recording a new IT system, updating defense strategy to address a new risk or modifying a process that did not work as expected. 

Routine testing can help organizations identify issues with the plan before they can affect BC. And, businesses should view BC plans as living documents, revising and honing them after each test or disaster to ensure efficacy.  

The Disaster Recovery Plan

A BC plan is not complete without incorporating a DR element. A DR plan provides detailed instructions on how to protect and restore critical IT systems, interrupted applications and lost data. The data center itself is an important element in mitigating the risk to uptime. Data centers are built with hardened exteriors that can withstand hurricane force winds; some are architected in anticipation of earthquakes or the challenge inherent in locations where exceptionally high or low temperatures are common. 

Identify and Prioritize Critical IT infrastructure

The DR plan integrates much of the information discovered in the BC plan’s risk and business impact assessments, with a narrowed focus on IT infrastructure. A DR plan requires businesses to identify critical systems, applications and data and rank them according to their criticality in supporting ongoing business operations. Organizations should also identify any dependencies. By tiering IT infrastructure, organizations can ensure the most vital infrastructure is brought back online first.

Create a Data Backup and Recovery Plan

To limit downtime, a DRP should define the specific policies, procedures and practices necessary to recover IT systems, applications and data after the disaster. 

Like the BC plan, the DR plan should provide step-by-step instructions that specify the actions to take before, during and after a crisis. This includes establishing plans to backup data and recover operations. The frequency with which organizations need to perform backups and the speed at which various assets must be restored are key. Identifying recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) can help organizations decipher this information.

RPO . The RPO isolates the point in time from which data needs to be restored. To define the RPO, organizations must determine how much data they can afford to lose without significantly impacting the business. This information will help organizations decide how frequently they should backup data. Frequent or continuous backups allow organizations to recover data from just before the disruption for minimal data loss. Less frequent backups can only restore data from the last backup. Small businesses that do not operate around the clock or perform frequent transactions can afford to conduct less frequent backups. However, 24x7x365 operations, such as online retailers and financial institutions, that process large quantities of data, need frequent backups to reduce the amount of data lost. 

RTO . The RTO defines how much downtime an organization can tolerate without significantly impacting operations. This metric factors in the impact and cost of downtime to help organizations determine how quickly they must restore operations.

Together, these metrics help organizations build a DR strategy that integrates appropriate backup and recovery plans. 

Establishing a DR team to carry out the prescribed DR tasks is essential to the efficacy of the DRP. Like the BC team, each member of the DR team should be assigned and trained on specific responsibilities. Organizations should also create a communication plan to allow team members to connect with internal and external stakeholders to keep them informed during the recovery process.  

STRENGTHENING BC AND DR WITH COLOCATION

Modern colocation data centers offer the leading-edge infrastructure and expertise to support organizations’ BC and DR strategies.

Redundancies

The various redundancies built into third-party data centers are designed to support uptime and resiliency. Redundant UPSes , generators and CRAHs installed in colocation data centers provide a backup system that can take on the load of a failed system. Additionally, colocation offers diverse power feeds and connectivity options to provide an alternative path if the primary one fails. Colocation providers also foster relationships with vendors to ensure they can secure additional fuel, equipment and other resources during a lengthy disaster. 

The level of redundancy offered by data centers varies. Organizations should review a data center’s uptime guarantee before partnering.  

Geo-diverse Locations  

Some colocation providers can also offer a portfolio of geographically distant data centers to allow businesses to choose the locations that meet their unique needs. An organization can choose a primary site near its headquarters for convenience and a more remote, secondary facility for DR purposes. This dual deployment model allows businesses to failover operations to the DR site, if the primary location becomes unavailable. The distance between these data centers ensures a localized disaster cannot impact both facilities. This location can also be used to backup data or to provide a facility for staff to work in if the production site is inaccessible. 

Scheduled Maintenance

Colocation data centers also support BC through scheduled maintenance programs and equipment refreshes, which optimize the performance and availability of systems. Routine maintenance can be overlooked by businesses’ internal IT teams, whose focus is on implementing IT strategies designed to reach core business objectives. This can leave systems vulnerable to failures. Third-party data centers have technicians dedicated to monitoring, managing and maintaining data center equipment 24x7x365 to limit issues.

Regular inspections of the physical infrastructure should be part of preventive maintenance. Electrical and power systems, UPS, generators, heating and cooling, smoke detection and fire extinguishing, as well as the miles of cables and connection need to be scrupulously maintained. 

Skilled on-staff data center technicians engineers are also available to help organizations design and implement BC and DR strategies that promote uptime. 

Purpose-built Facilities

Third-party data center providers choose locations that are outside of areas prone to natural disasters and other environmental risks. For added protection, they also specifically design and construct the facilities to endure extreme conditions, such as high winds and tremors, to protect customers’ IT assets. To limit unauthorized access that can invite risk, colocation data centers utilize a series of security measures, protocols and best practices—including access controls, video surveillance and on-site, trained security personnel. 

Flexible Deployment, Backup and Recovery Options

Many third-party data centers offer access to both colocation and cloud services. These diverse deployments allow organizations to build flexible BC/DR solutions that integrate hybrid IT, various backup options, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and more. This flexibility also allows organizations to meet specific operational requirements and budgetary restraints. Access to cloud services can be particularly important when supporting remote work capabilities. 

While devising BC and DR strategies is complex, the effort is well worth the time and energy spent. The ability to continue business operations and effectively restore IT infrastructure in the face of a crisis is critical to business success. Third-party data centers can offer the advice, technical support and infrastructure to ensure operational resilience and availability in even the most challenging circumstances.  

* Information Technology Intelligence Counseling, source

David Brennan

David Brennan

VP of DCO Programs

David is responsible for overseeing the qualification program, program management, process development and metrics reporting for CoreSite’s Data Center Operations organization.

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Stn data management, coresite colocation optimize backups & dr, data resilience and it resilience: the foundation for business continuity/disaster recovery success, data center security: when security gets physical, breaking down data center tier level classifications, how data centers enable disaster recovery on-demand, subscribe to coresite.

business continuity plan in data center

business continuity plan in data center

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What is Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a strategic framework that outlines a set of procedures and protocols to be followed in the event of a crisis or disaster. It is a proactive approach taken by organizations to ensure the continuation of critical business operations and minimize the impact of disruptive events. A BCP is designed to address a wide range of potential threats, including natural disasters, power outages, cyber-attacks, system failures, pandemics, and other unforeseen emergencies. It takes into account various aspects of the organization, including people, processes, technology, and facilities, to ensure that all critical components are protected and can be quickly recovered. A Business Continuity Plan is a dynamic document that should be regularly reviewed and updated to reflect changes in the organization’s operations, technology, and external environment. It should be accessible to key personnel and stakeholders, ensuring that everyone is aware of their roles and responsibilities during a crisis. The primary objective of a BCP is to enable organizations to adapt and respond effectively to disruptions, allowing them to continue providing essential services, meet customer expectations, and protect their reputation. By having a robust BCP in place, organizations can demonstrate their commitment to operational resilience, customer satisfaction, and risk management. It provides a framework to proactively address potential disruptions, protect critical assets, and ensure the continuity of business operations, even in challenging circumstances.

IT Business Continuity Plan

A thorough Business Continuity Plan typically includes the following key elements:

Risk assessment.

Identifying and assessing potential risks and vulnerabilities that could impact the organization's operations. This step involves understanding the likelihood and potential impact of different scenarios.

Business Impact Analysis

Evaluating the criticality and dependencies of various business functions and processes. This analysis helps prioritize resources and determine recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for different systems and services.

Prevention and Preparedness

Implementing preventive measures and preparedness strategies to minimize the likelihood and impact of disruptions. This may include redundancy in infrastructure, backup and recovery systems, data protection measures, and employee training.

Incident Response

Establishing clear protocols and communication channels to respond to incidents promptly and efficiently. This involves defining roles and responsibilities, activating emergency response teams, and coordinating actions to mitigate the impact of the incident.

Recovery and Restoration

Outlining the steps and procedures required to restore critical systems, data, and infrastructure. This includes data recovery, system reconfiguration, and verification of the integrity and functionality of the recovered assets.

Testing and Maintenance

Regularly reviewing, testing, and updating the BCP to ensure its effectiveness. Conducting drills and simulations help identify gaps and areas for improvement, enabling organizations to refine their strategies and procedures.

Why is Business Continuity Plan Important to Data Centers

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a strategic framework that outlines a set of procedures and protocols to be followed in the event of a crisis or disaster. It focuses on minimizing downtime, protecting critical assets, and enabling businesses to swiftly recover and resume operations. For data centers, a BCP is crucial as it ensures the availability and integrity of data, mitigates potential risks, and maintains service continuity for customers. By implementing a robust BCP, data centers can proactively prepare for potential disruptions, minimize downtime, and provide uninterrupted services, instilling confidence in their clients and safeguarding their critical assets.

Ensuring Data Availability and Integrity

Data centers are responsible for housing and managing vast amounts of critical data for businesses and organizations. A BCP outlines procedures and protocols to ensure the availability and integrity of this data, even in the face of disruptive events. By implementing measures such as redundant systems, data replication, and backup strategies, data centers can minimize the risk of data loss and maintain continuous access to vital information, protecting the interests of their clients and enabling seamless business processes.

Mitigating Potential Risks

Data centers face various potential risks, including natural disasters, power outages, hardware failures, cyber-attacks, and human errors. A BCP allows data centers to proactively identify and assess these risks, implementing preventive measures and contingency plans to minimize their impact. By having a well-defined BCP, data centers can effectively mitigate risks and respond swiftly and efficiently to unexpected events, reducing downtime and ensuring uninterrupted service for their customers.

Maintaining Service Continuity for Customers

Data centers play a critical role in supporting the operations of their customers. Business continuity is vital for organizations that rely on data centers to store their data, host their applications, and ensure the availability of their services. A robust BCP helps data centers maintain service continuity by establishing protocols for monitoring, incident response, and disaster recovery. This ensures that even during a crisis or disaster, data centers can continue to provide the necessary infrastructure and support to their customers, minimizing disruptions and protecting their business interests.

Meeting Regulatory and Compliance Requirements

Data centers often operate in highly regulated industries, such as finance, healthcare, and government. Compliance with industry-specific regulations and standards is crucial to maintaining trust and meeting legal obligations. A BCP helps data centers demonstrate their commitment to regulatory compliance by incorporating measures to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This includes disaster recovery planning, data backup strategies, and security protocols that align with industry best practices and regulatory requirements.

data center business continuity plan

What is Disaster Recovery (DR)

Disaster Recovery (DR) is an essential aspect of a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan (BCP). While the BCP encompasses a broader strategic framework, DR specifically focuses on the processes and technologies necessary for recovering and restoring IT infrastructure and data in the aftermath of a disruptive event.

The primary goal of DR is to minimize data loss and quickly restore critical systems and services, enabling organizations to resume their operations efficiently and effectively. It involves implementing a set of predefined procedures, policies, and technologies to recover IT assets and restore them to a functional state within predetermined recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Key components and activities involved in disaster recovery include:

Data Replication and Backups

This ensures that copies of critical data are maintained in geographically separate locations or on different systems. By having redundant copies of data, organizations can recover and restore information in case of data loss or system failures.

Infrastructure and System Recovery

DR plans outline the steps and procedures to be followed for recovering IT infrastructure, including servers, networks, storage systems, and other critical components. This may involve rebuilding or restoring hardware configurations, reinstalling software, and reconfiguring network settings.

Testing and Validation

Regular testing and validation of the DR plan is crucial to ensure its effectiveness. Organizations conduct drills, simulations, and scenario-based exercises to verify the recovery procedures, identify potential gaps or weaknesses, and refine the plan accordingly.

Communication and Coordination

DR plans include protocols for notifying key stakeholders, activating the necessary recovery teams, and establishing clear lines of communication. This ensures that everyone involved is aware of their roles and responsibilities, facilitating a smooth and coordinated recovery process.

Continuous Improvement

DR is an ongoing process that requires regular review and updates. Organizations should continuously assess and enhance their DR strategies to adapt to evolving threats, changes in technology, and business requirements. By staying proactive and keeping the DR plan up to date, organizations can effectively address emerging risks and maintain a high level of resilience.

What Can OneAsia Provide?

At OneAsia, we recognize the criticality of maintaining uninterrupted business operations, particularly for data centers, connectivity, cloud services, and critical environments. That’s why we have developed a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan (BCP) service tailored to safeguard your organization’s data, applications, and IT infrastructure, aligning with our expertise in these areas.

Our BCP service encompasses the full spectrum of our service scope, ensuring that your critical operations remain resilient and operational in the face of challenges. Whether you rely on our state-of-the-art data centers, leverage our cloud services for your infrastructure, or depend on our connectivity solutions to keep your business connected, our BCP service is designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing IT environment.

We understand that digital transformation is a key priority for organizations today. Our BCP service takes this into account, providing a strategic framework to protect and sustain your digital initiatives. We work closely with you to assess the potential risks and vulnerabilities specific to your digital transformation journey, and then develop and implement a BCP that encompasses your critical digital assets, applications, and processes.

By leveraging our deep expertise in the data center industry, we ensure that our BCP service goes beyond traditional disaster recovery. We consider the unique requirements of your IT infrastructure, including server colocation, network architecture, and redundant power systems, to provide a comprehensive plan that addresses all facets of your critical environment.

With OneAsia’s BCP service, you can have confidence in the continuity of your business operations. Our team of experts collaborates closely with you to understand your specific needs and tailor a BCP solution that aligns with your business objectives. We conduct rigorous testing and maintenance to validate the effectiveness of the plan, ensuring that it remains up to date and in line with industry best practices.

IT Business Continuity Plan

What is the purpose of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?

The purpose of a BCP is to ensure the continuity of critical business operations in the face of disruptive events or disasters. It outlines procedures, protocols, and strategies to minimize downtime, protect assets, and enable swift recovery, thus safeguarding the organization’s reputation and ensuring uninterrupted service.

Why is it important for data centers to have a Business Continuity Plan?

A BCP is crucial for data centers as it ensures data availability, minimizes risks, and maintains service continuity. It safeguards critical assets, minimizes downtime, and enables swift recovery from disruptions, ensuring uninterrupted services for customers.

How frequently should a Business Continuity Plan be reviewed and updated?

It is recommended to review and update a BCP regularly, typically at least annually or whenever significant changes occur within the organization. This ensures that the plan remains relevant, aligns with evolving business needs, incorporates lessons learned from previous incidents, and incorporates updated information about technology, personnel, and resources.

business continuity plan in data center

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Role of a Modern Data Center in Your Business Continuity Plan

by admin | Jun 26, 2017 | Business , Datacenter , Disaster Recovery | 0 comments

Role of a Modern Data Center in Your Business Continuity Plan

Businesses lose money when their operations are disrupted. The business profits are reduced when these lost revenues add up with extra expenses for troubleshooting and repairing. Additionally, the costs of the customers that jump ship to a competitor cannot be covered by insurance.

Being unprepared to any unexpected events can disrupt the operation, for small size businesses, the impact of the above-mentioned make business continuity essential.

What is business continuity and why is it important?

An essential part of a company’s response planning, business continuity defines how the business will continue operating after a disaster or major interruption. More importantly, it shows how the business will recover to an operational state within a reasonable period of time. Business continuity or BC has three key elements including:

  • Contingency

Here, resilience means designing key business functions and the supporting infrastructure in a way that makes the impact of relevant disruptions as good as negligible. Recovery is making arrangements to restore or recover both the critical and non-critical business functions that fail for some reason. Finally, contingency is a plan to restore or recover the business functions in case recovery and resilience arrangements prove inadequate. The contingency element of business continuity allows a business to cope effectively with any disasters or incidents that may occur in the future including the unforeseen events.

A business can ensure business continuity after an incident or disaster by developing a business continuity plan (BCP) that includes the aforementioned elements of BC. The BCP does not need to be specific and can be applied to any major disruption such as power failure, flooding, infrastructural failure or fire. However, it is important that the continuity plan is clearly presented and does not include any vague abbreviations or internal references so that people can easily understand what’s expected from them. Following are some of the main things that a BCP should do:

  • Identify assets and processes critical to delivering business
  • Detail responses including the initial response to a disaster or incident and the longer-term measures to return to business as usual
  • Detail ways of making your business stronger whilst BCP is developed
  • Show how the business will adjust, test, review and update their business continuity plan

A number of components including desktop and laptop computers, servers, wireless devices, and networks are part of Information Technology (IT).

Moreover, businesses today need both enterprise and office productivity software to run their operations. For this reason, disaster recovery strategies for information technology should be a part of a business’s continuity planning. An efficient & reliable IT disaster recovery plan should be strategized according to the BCP.

A professional disaster recovery plan for information technology is having a reliable and accessible data center.  A modern data center can ensure business continuity by:

  • Serving as both a primary and a backup facility for your data repositories, transaction systems, and private cloud
  • Linking data and systems in facilities across the different regions
  • Safeguarding access to your computer systems by delivering diverse connectivity options from numerous network providers

As seen above, you can improve the protection of your critical business processes and ensure business continuity after an incident or disaster with a modern colocation. Here is the list of major factors when choosing a DR colocation datacenter:

Economic Factors:

A DR datacenter does not necessarily need to have all the requirements of your primary operation center. Since it is only being used in time of disaster, therefore you don’t need to pay for premium Tier 3 datacenter features like multiple utility service provider or multiple concurrently maintained cooling systems. That is why a Tier 2 datacenter facility like Nuday is a perfect fit as DR site for your business continuity plan.

Connectivity options:

Syncing data between the main datacenter site and your DR site can be a bottleneck if the connection between the two is not provided with the same telecom provider. A DR location like Nuday is connected to the top 4 Canadian fiber optic providers which are Bell, Rogers, Cogeco and HydroOne. Moreover, Nuday has a key footprint in the largest telco hotel in Canada (151 Front St.) and therefore can connect to top global service providers like Cogent, TeliaSonera, HurricaneElectric and Level3.

Geographical Location and Accessibility:

Being the 3 rd most populated city in North America and being hub to AirCanada with the largest global network airline in North America, being away from most natural disasters like Hurricane and Earth Quick, Toronto is a safe choice for global DR locations. However, bear in mind that DR datacenters are better be off the central metropolitan and business district due to restrictions (transit strikes, riots,  protests or terrorist attacks ) you might face at the time of disasters. Located next to major highways (404 and 407 ),  easy communicating to Pearson airport and being away from hustle and bustle of downtown Toronto, Nuday colocation datacenter is a top candidate datacenter for your DR plan.

At Nuday, we understand the importance of a data center DRP. Our datacenter experts will assist customers to create a DRP and make sure that it meets all the requirements of their organization.

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Blog Business

7 Business Continuity Plan Examples

By Danesh Ramuthi , Nov 28, 2023

Business Continuity Plan Examples

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a strategic framework that prepares businesses to maintain or swiftly resume their critical functions in the face of disruptions, whether they stem from natural disasters, technological failures, human error, or other unforeseen events.

In today’s fast-paced world, businesses face an array of potential disruptions ranging from cyberattacks and ransomware to severe weather events and global pandemics. By having a well-crafted BCP, businesses can mitigate these risks, ensuring the safety and continuity of their critical services and operations.

Responsibility for business continuity planning typically lies with top management and dedicated planning teams within an organization. It is a cross-functional effort that involves input and coordination across various departments, ensuring that all aspects of the business are considered.

For businesses looking to develop or refine their business continuity strategies, there are numerous resources available. Tools like Venngage’s business plan maker and their business continuity plan templates offer practical assistance, streamlining the process of creating a robust and effective BCP. 

Click to jump ahead: 

7 business continuity plan examples

Business continuity types, how to write a business continuity plan, how often should a business continuity plan be reviewed, business continuity plan vs. disaster recovery plan, final thoughts.

In business, unpredictability is the only certainty. This is where business continuity plans (BCPs) come into play. These plans are not just documents; they are a testament to a company’s preparedness and commitment to sustained operations under adverse conditions. To illustrate the practicality and necessity of these plans, let’s delve into some compelling examples.

Business continuity plan example for small business

Imagine a small business specializing in digital marketing services, with a significant portion of its operations reliant on continuous internet connectivity and digital communication tools. This business, although small, caters to a global clientele, making its online presence and prompt service delivery crucial.

Business Consultant Continuity Plan Template

Scope and objective:

This Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is designed to ensure the continuity of digital marketing services and client communications in the event of an unforeseen and prolonged internet outage. Such an outage could be caused by a variety of factors, including cyberattacks, technical failures or service provider issues. The plan aims to minimize disruption to these critical services, ensuring that client projects are delivered on time and communication lines remain open and effective.

Operations at risk:

Operation: Digital Marketing Services Operation Description: A team dedicated to creating and managing digital marketing campaigns for clients across various time zones. Business Impact: High Impact Description: The team manages all client communications, campaign designs, and real-time online marketing strategies. An internet outage would halt all ongoing campaigns and client communications, leading to potential loss of business and client trust.

Recovery strategy:

The BCP should include immediate measures like switching to a backup internet service provider or using mobile data as a temporary solution. The IT team should be prepared to deploy these alternatives swiftly. Additionally, the company should have a protocol for informing clients about the situation via alternative communication channels like mobile phones.

Roles and responsibilities:

Representative: Alex Martinez Role: IT Manager Description of Responsibilities:

  • Oversee the implementation of the backup internet connectivity plan.
  • Coordinate with the digital marketing team to ensure minimal disruption in campaign management.
  • Communicate with the service provider for updates and resolution timelines.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Business continuity plan example for software company

In the landscape of software development, a well-structured Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is vital. This example illustrates a BCP for a software company, focusing on a different kind of disruption: a critical data breach.

Business Continuity Plan Template

Scope and objectives:

This BCP is designed to ensure the continuity of software development and client data security in the event of a significant data breach. Such a breach could be due to cyberattacks, internal security lapses, or third-party service vulnerabilities. The plan prioritizes the rapid response to secure data, assess the impact on software development projects and maintain client trust and communication.

Operation: Software Development and Data Security Operation Description: The software development team is responsible for creating and maintaining software products, which involves handling sensitive client data. In the realm of software development, where the creation and maintenance of products involve handling sensitive client data, prioritizing security is crucial. Strengthen your software development team’s capabilities by incorporating the best antivirus with VPN features, offering a robust defense to protect client information and maintain a secure operational environment. The integrity and security of this data are paramount.

Business Impact: Critical Impact Description: A data breach could compromise client data, leading to loss of trust, legal consequences and potential financial penalties. It could also disrupt ongoing development projects and delay product releases.

The IT security team should immediately isolate the breached systems to prevent further data loss. They should then work on identifying the breach’s source and extent. Simultaneously, the client relations team should inform affected clients about the breach and the steps being taken. The company should also engage a third-party cybersecurity firm for an independent investigation and recovery assistance.

Representative: Sarah Lopez Role: Head of IT Security Contact Details: [email protected] Description of Responsibilities:

  • Lead the initial response to the data breach, including system isolation and assessment.
  • Coordinate with external cybersecurity experts for breach analysis and mitigation.
  • Work with the legal team to understand and comply with data breach notification laws.
  • Communicate with the software development team leaders about the impact on ongoing projects.

Business Continuity Plan Templates

Related: 7 Best Business Plan Software for 2023

Business continuity plan example for manufacturing

In the manufacturing sector, disruptions can significantly impact production lines, supply chains, and customer commitments. This example of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for a manufacturing company addresses a specific scenario: a major supply chain disruption.

Business Continuity Plan Template

This BCP is formulated to ensure the continuity of manufacturing operations in the event of a significant supply chain disruption. Such disruptions could be caused by geopolitical events, natural disasters affecting key suppliers or transportation network failures. The plan focuses on maintaining production capabilities and fulfilling customer orders by managing and mitigating supply chain risks.

Operation: Production Line Operation Description: The production line is dependent on a steady supply of raw materials and components from various suppliers to manufacture products. Business Impact: High Impact Description: A disruption in the supply chain can lead to a halt in production, resulting in delayed order fulfillment, loss of revenue and potential damage to customer relationships.

The company should establish relationships with alternative suppliers to ensure a diversified supply chain. In the event of a disruption, the procurement team should be able to quickly switch to these alternative sources. Additionally, maintaining a strategic reserve of critical materials can buffer short-term disruptions. The logistics team should also develop flexible transportation plans to adapt to changing scenarios.

Representative: Michael Johnson Role: Head of Supply Chain Management Contact Details: [email protected] Description of Responsibilities:

  • Monitor global supply chain trends and identify potential risks.
  • Develop and maintain relationships with alternative suppliers.
  • Coordinate with logistics to ensure flexible transportation solutions.
  • Communicate with production managers about supply chain status and potential impacts on production schedules.

Related: 15+ Business Plan Templates for Strategic Planning

BCPs are essential for ensuring that a business can continue operating during crises. Here’s a summary of the different types of business continuity plans that are common:

  • Operational : Involves ensuring that critical systems and processes continue functioning without disruption. It’s vital to have a plan to minimize revenue loss in case of disruptions.
  • Technological : For businesses heavily reliant on technology, this type of continuity plan focuses on maintaining and securing internal systems, like having offline storage for important documents.
  • Economic continuity : This type ensures that the business remains profitable during disruptions. It involves future-proofing the organization against scenarios that could negatively impact the bottom line.
  • Workforce continuity : Focuses on maintaining adequate and appropriate staffing levels, especially during crises, ensuring that the workforce is capable of handling incoming work.
  • Safety : Beyond staffing, safety continuity involves creating a comfortable and secure work environment where employees feel supported, especially during crises.
  • Environmental : It addresses the ability of the team to operate effectively and safely in their physical work environment, considering threats to physical office spaces and planning accordingly.
  • Security : Means prioritizing the safety and security of employees and business assets, planning for potential security breaches and safeguarding important business information.
  • Reputation : Focuses on maintaining customer satisfaction and a good reputation, monitoring conversations about the brand and having action plans for reputation management.

Business Continuity Planning Templates

As I have explained so far, a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is invaluable. Writing an effective BCP involves a series of strategic steps, each crucial to ensuring that your business can withstand and recover from unexpected events. Here’s a guide on how to craft a robust business continuity plan:

Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Plan Template

1. Choose your business continuity team

Assemble a dedicated team responsible for the development and implementation of the BCP. The team should include members from various departments with a deep understanding of the business operations.

2. Outline your plan objectives

Clearly articulate what the plan aims to achieve. Objectives may include minimizing financial loss, ensuring the safety of employees, maintaining critical business operations, and protecting the company’s reputation.

3. Meet with key players in your departments

Engage with department heads and key personnel to gain insights into the specific needs and processes of each department. This helps in identifying critical functions and resources.

4. Identify critical functions and types of threats

Determine which functions are vital to the business’s survival and identify potential threats that could impact these areas. 

5. Carry on risk assessments across different areas

Evaluate the likelihood and impact of identified threats on each critical function. This assessment helps in prioritizing the risks and planning accordingly.

6. Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA)

Perform a BIA to understand the potential consequences of disruption to critical business functions. It has to be done in determining the maximum acceptable downtime and the resources needed for business continuity.

7. Start drafting the plan

Compile the information gathered into a structured document. The plan should include emergency contact information, recovery strategies and detailed action steps for different scenarios.

8. Test the plan for any gaps

Conduct simulations or tabletop exercises to test the plan’s effectiveness. This testing can reveal unforeseen gaps or weaknesses in the plan.

9. Review & revise your plan

Use the insights gained from testing to refine and update the plan. Continual revision ensures the plan remains relevant and effective in the face of changing business conditions and emerging threats.

Read Also: How to Write a Business Plan Outline [Examples + Templates]

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) should ideally be reviewed and updated at least annually. 

The annual review ensures that the plan remains relevant and effective in the face of new challenges and changes within the business, such as shifts in business strategy, introduction of new technology or changes in operational processes. 

Additionally, it’s crucial to reassess the BCP following any significant business changes, such as mergers, acquisitions or entry into new markets, as well as after the occurrence of any major incident that tested the plan’s effectiveness. 

However, in rapidly changing industries or in businesses that face a high degree of uncertainty or frequent changes, more frequent reviews – such as bi-annually or quarterly – may be necessary. 

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) are two crucial components of organizational preparedness, yet they serve different functions. The BCP is aimed at preventing interruptions to business operations and maintaining regular activities. 

It focuses on aspects such as the location of operations during a crisis (like a temporary office or remote work), how staff will communicate and which functions are prioritized. In essence, a BCP details how a business can continue operating during and after a disruption​​​​.

On the other hand, a DRP is more specific to restoring data access and IT infrastructure after a disaster. It describes the steps that employees must follow during and after a disaster to ensure minimal function necessary for the organization to continue. 

Essentially, while a BCP is about maintaining operations, a DRP is about restoring critical functions, particularly IT-related, after a disruption has occurred​

It’s clear that having a robust and adaptable business continuity plan (BCP) is not just a strategic advantage but a fundamental necessity for businesses of all sizes and sectors. 

From small businesses to large corporations, the principles of effective business continuity planning remain consistent: identify potential threats, assess the impact on critical functions, and develop a comprehensive strategy to maintain operations during and after a disruption.

The process of writing a BCP, as detailed in this article, underscores the importance of a thorough and thoughtful approach. It’s about more than just drafting a document; it’s about creating a living framework that evolves with your business and the changing landscape of risks.

To assist in this crucial task, you can use Venngage’s business plan maker & their business continuity plan templates . These tools streamline the process of creating a BCP, ensuring that it is not only comprehensive but also clear, accessible and easy to implement. 

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  1. How to create an effective business continuity plan?

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  2. Role of a Modern Data Center in Your Business Continuity Plan

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  3. What is a Business Continuity Plan?

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  4. Free Business Continuity Plan Templates

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  5. 7 Free Business Continuity Plan Templates

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    Praise for Business Continuity Planning for Data Centers and Systems: A Strategic Implementation Guide "Continuity is a primary business driver. This timely book offers a refreshingly honest road map to informed decision making by one of the mission critical industry's foremost real estate experts. It is a must-read for anyone thinking about 7x24."

  12. Data Center Business Continuity

    A data center's business continuity plan will function as a roadmap. If a disaster strikes, you will hopefully be able to find the type of disaster in your business continuity plan and then begin following the "map" to get to the solution and restore your data center to business as usual.

  13. Develop a Business Continuity Plan

    A business continuity plan (BCP) consists of separate but related sub-plans, as illustrated below. This blueprint enables you to: ... If your data center and core systems are down, technology-enabled workarounds (such as collaboration via mobile technologies or cloud-based solutions) could help you weather the outage, and may be more flexible ...

  14. 6 Key Components of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

    According to ISO 22301, a business continuity plan is defined as "documented procedures that guide organizations to R espond, R ecover, R esume, and R estore to a pre-defined level of operations following disruption.". Disaster recovery is a subset of the overall BCP because, without your data, you are at the mercy of whatever disruption ...

  15. Building a Business Continuity Plan: You Will Need One

    While drafting a business continuity plan, it's important to include four key factors: consequence-based planning, identifying critical functions, planning for the expected and preparing a check list to cover all your bases. ... Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data ...

  16. Business Continuity Planning for Data Centers and Systems: A ...

    Description Praise for Business Continuity Planning for Data Centers and Systems: A Strategic Implementation Guide "Continuity is a primary business driver. This timely book offers a refreshingly honest road map to informed decision making by one of the mission critical industry's foremost real estate experts.

  17. Business Continuity Planning

    Data centres and disaster recovery spaces are important to all businesses, big or small. We understand the critical role that our data centres play in delivering critical support and are committed to work with you on your business continuity plans (BCP) and disaster recovery efforts. Leveraging our quality facilities and robust services, we strive to support our customers in achieving ...

  18. Business Continuity Plans for Data Centers

    This is where a comprehensive business continuity plan comes into play, ensuring that your business operations carry on with little to no interruption. At the heart of any robust business continuity plan lies a carefully designed strategy for protecting data centers — an area where the unexpected is always lying in wait.

  19. Data Centre Business Continuity Plans

    A Business Continuity Plan ( BCP) for a data centre or any other type of organisation with supplying a critical service or product is a documented plan to ensure the organisation can continue to provide the service or product during and after an emergency, disaster or threat.

  20. Strengthening Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery with ...

    This makes business continuity (BC) plans and disaster recovery (DR) plans essential to every business, regardless of industry, revenue or size. The good news is that colocation can provide the foundation that supports the success of these plans. Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery

  21. Business Continuity Plan for data center & server

    A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a strategic framework that outlines a set of procedures and protocols to be followed in the event of a crisis or disaster. It focuses on minimizing downtime, protecting critical assets, and enabling businesses to swiftly recover and resume operations. For data centers, a BCP is crucial as it ensures the ...

  22. Role of a Modern Data Center in Your Business Continuity Plan

    A professional disaster recovery plan for information technology is having a reliable and accessible data center. A modern data center can ensure business continuity by: Serving as both a primary and a backup facility for your data repositories, transaction systems, and private cloud. Linking data and systems in facilities across the different ...

  23. 7 Business Continuity Plan Examples

    CUSTOMIZE THIS BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN Scope and objectives: This BCP is designed to ensure the continuity of software development and client data security in the event of a significant data breach. Such a breach could be due to cyberattacks, internal security lapses, or third-party service vulnerabilities.

  24. 4 data center trends to watch in 2024

    Energy sustainability. To decrease the degree and pace at which global temperatures are rising, the United Nations created a net-zero commitment plan that must be met by 2050. This plan pressures countries around the world to create and follow guidelines to cut out all greenhouse gas emissions by the deadline in an effort to stop the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in global temperature.

  25. How To Ensure Business Continuity In The Face Of Internet ...

    Artificial intelligence (AI) can be further leveraged for business continuity, with a 2022 Deloitte survey revealing that 76% of respondents plan to increase investments in AI to gain more ...

  26. Microsoft buys Xcel Energy land for data center in Becker

    Microsoft Corp. has purchased nearly 300 acres of land in Becker, Minnesota, from Xcel Energy Inc. for a new data center. The Redmond, Washington-based technology giant purchased six parcels for ...