Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
table 8.4
Business Con
tinuity Best practices
Best Practice
Rationale
Executive buy-in and
backing
No clout, no cash, no continuity
Dedicated BC personnel
A business continuity policy is a start. A BC plan is
better, and a tested plan even better. Dedicated
personnel who are accountable for implementation,
testing, review, and modification are the best.
Dedicated BC budget
A plan and personnel cannot happen without the
budget. Part of the ROI is determining how much
potential loss there is for downtime of key business
functions (see Figure 8.14).
The key term in business
continuity is business.
Too often, the focus is on technical continuity or
technical recovery. The intent of a working technical
infrastructure is to support the business functions
and personnel that use it. Recovery of business
function requires a location, personnel, and the
technology to support them.
Recovery strategy
Recovery strategy that includes people, process,
technology, physical site, and documents—paper
documents that may be key to successful recovery
process and recovery of operations
Recovery plan exists
The initial plan exists and policy and procedures for
periodic review and modification. The review cycle
includes BIA, document review, technical review,
review of BC and recovery plans, gap analysis
between BIA and BC plan, and remediation plan.
Data storage strategy
and policy
Store organizational data on commonly accessible
servers that are part of the backup process. Create
and enforce policy that no critical data is exclusively
stored on local PCs.
Testing
Test that X is prepared to support the recovery effort,
where X ( (site [hot, warm, or cold]), servers, clients,
backup tapes, etc.). Personal experience found an
initial recovery test that took three days could be
shortened by lessons learned to three hours.
