Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is a methodology to create a plan for how an organization will resume partially or completely interrupted critical function(s) within a predetermined time after a disaster or disruption. BCP may be a part of a larger organizational effort to reduce operational risk, and thus has a number of overlaps with the practice of risk management. A completed BCP planning cycle results in a formal printed manual available for reference before, during, and after disruptions have occurred. For the purposes of this article, the term disaster will be used to represent natural disaster, man-made disaster, and disruptions. BCP is not a new concept; plans for disasters, like Noah's Ark, are evidenced from the beginning of human history. In the years prior to January 1, 2000, governments anticipated computer failures, called the Y2k problem, in important social infrastructure like power, telecommunication, health and financial industries. Regulatory agencies subsequently required those industries to formalize BCP manuals to protect the public. Regulatory and business focus on BCP arguably waned somewhat due to the problem-free Y2K rollover. This disinterest unequivocally ended September 11th 2001, when simultaneous terrorist attacks devastated downtown New York City and changed the 'worst case scenario' paradigm for business continuity planning 1.
Introduction
BCP methodology is scalable for an organization of any size and complexity. Even though the methodology has roots in regulated industries, any type of organization may create a BCP manual, and arguably every organization should have one in order to ensure the organization's longevity. A BCP manual for a small organization may be simply a printed manual stored safely away from the primary work location, containing the names, addresses, and phone numbers for crisis management staff, general staff members, clients, and vendors along with the location of the offsite data backup storage media. At its most complex, a BCP manual may outline a secondary work site, technical requirements and readiness, regulatory reporting requirements, work recovery measures and many other informational components. As such, BCP encompasses emergency management, disaster recovery planning, contingency planning , and business resumption planning .
The development of a BCP manual has five main phases: analysis, solution design, implementation, testing and organization acceptance, and maintenance.
Analysis
The analysis phase in the development of a BCP manual consists of an impact analysis, threat analysis, and impact scenarios with the resulting BCP plan requirement documentation.
Impact analysis
An impact analysis results in the differentiation between critical and non-critical organization functions. A function may be considered critical if the implications for stakeholders of damage to the organization resulting are regarded as unacceptable. Perceptions of the acceptability of disruption may be modified by the cost of establishing and maintaining appropriate business or technical recovery solutions. A function may also be considered critical if dictated by law. Next, the impact analysis results in the recovery requirements for each critical function. Recovery requirements consist of the following information:
- The time frame in which the critical function must be resumed after the disaster
- The business requirements for recovery of the critical function, and/or
- The technical requirements for recovery of the critical function
Threat analysis
The
coronavirus suggested as a causative agent for the
SARS outbreak in 2002
After defining recovery requirements, documenting potential threats is recommended to detail a specific disaster’s unique recovery steps. Some common threats include the following:
All threats in the examples above share a common impact, potential of damage to organizational infrastructure, except one: disease. Diseases’ impact is purely human but can be ameliorated with technical and business solutions. During the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, some organizations grouped staff into separate teams, and rotated the teams between the primary and secondary work sites, with a rotation frequency equal to the incubation period of the disease. The organizations also banned face-to-face contact between opposing team members during business and non-business hours. With such a split, organizations increased their resiliency against the threat of government-ordered quarantine measures if one person in a team contracted or was exposed to the disease 1. Damage from flooding also has a unique characteristic. If an office environment is flooded with non-salinated and contamination-free water, equipment can be thoroughly dried and may still be functional.
Definition of impact scenarios
After defining potential threats, documenting the impact scenarios that form the basis of the business recovery plan is recommended. In general planning for the most wide-reaching disaster or disturbance is preferable to planning for a smaller scale problem as almost all smaller scale problems are elements of larger disasters. A typical impact scenario like 'Building Loss' will most likely encompass all critical business functions and the worst potential outcome from any potential threat. A business continuity plan may also document additional impact scenarios if an organization has more than one building. Other more specific impact scenarios, for example a scenario for loss of a specific floor in a building, may also be documented.
Recovery requirement documentation
After the completion of the analysis phase, the business and technical plan requirements are documented in order to commence the implementation phase. For an office based IT intensive business the plan requirements may cover the following elements:
- The numbers and types of desks, whether dedicated or shared, required outside of the primary business location in the secondary location
- The individuals involved in the recovery effort along with their contact and technical details
- The applications and application data required from the secondary location desks for critical business functions
- The manual workaround solutions
- The maximum outage allowed for the applications
- The peripheral requirements like printers, copier, fax machine, calculators, paper, pens etc.
Other business environments like production, distribution, warehousing etc will need to cover these elements but are likely to have additional issues to manage following a disrpuptive event.
Solution design
The goal of the solution design phase is to identify the most cost effective Disaster recovery solution that meets two main requirements from the impact analysis stage. For IT applications this is commonly expressed as:
- The minimum application and application data requirements
- The time frame in which the minimum application and application data must be available
Disaster recovery plans may also be required outside the IT applications domain, for example in preservation of information in hard copy format, or restoration of embedded technology in process plant.
This BCP phase overlaps with Disaster recovery planning methodology. The solution phase determines:
- the crisis management command structure
- the location of a secondary work site (where necessary)
- telecommunication architecture between primary and secondary work sites
- data replication methodology between primary and secondary work sites
- the application and software required at the secondary work site, and
- the type of physical data requirements at the secondary work site.
Implementation
The implementation phase, quite simply, is the execution of the design elements identified in the solution design phase. Work package testing may take place during the implementation of the solution, however, work package testing does not take the place of organizational testing.
Testing and organizational acceptance
The purpose of testing is to achieve organizational acceptance that the business continuity solution satisfies the organization's recovery requirements. Plans may fail to meet expectations due to insufficient or inaccurate recovery requirements, solution design flaws, or solution implementation errors. Testing may include:
- crisis command team call-out testing
- technical swing test from primary to secondary work locations
- technical swing test from secondary to primary work locations
- application test
- business process test
At minimum, testing is generally conducted on a biannual or annual schedule. Problems identified in the initial testing phase may be rolled up into the maintenance phase and retested during the next test cycle.
Maintenance
Maintenance of a BCP manual is broken down into three periodic activities. The first activity is the confirmation of information in the manual. The second activity is the testing and verification of technical solutions established for recovery operations. The third activity is the testing and verification of documented organization recovery procedures. A biannual or annual maintenance cycle is typical.
Information update and testing
All organizations change over time, therefore a BCP manual must change to stay relevant to the organization. Once data accuracy is verified normally a call tree test is conducted to evaluate the notification plan's efficiency as well as the accuracy of the contact data. Some types of changes that should be identified and updated in the manual include:
- Staffing changes
- Staffing personal detail changes like address and telephone numbers
- Changes to important clients and their contact details
- Changes to important vendors/suppliers and their contact details
Testing and verification of technical solutions
As a part of ongoing maintenance, any specialized technical deployments must be checked for functionality. Some checks include:
- Virus definition distribution
- Application security and service patch distribution
- Hardware operability check
- Application operability check
- Data verification
Testing and verification of organization recovery procedures
As work processes change over time, the previously documented organizational recovery procedures may no longer be suitable. Some checks include:
- Are all work processes for critical functions documented?
- Have the systems used in the execution of critical functions changed?
- Are the documented work checklists meaningful and accurate for staff?
Treatment of test failures
As suggested by the diagram included in this article, there is a direct relationship between the test and maintenance phases and the impact phase. When establishing a BCP manual and recovery infrastructure from scratch, issues found during the testing phase often must be reintroduced to the analysis phase.
See also
References
Further reading
- "ISO17799" by the International Organization for Standardization
- "A Guide to Business Continuity Planning" by James C. Barnes
External links
