1. Business Continuity A matter of survival Session 2 Continuity planning : background and life-cycle

2. Why important?
Heavy reliance on IT
Pressure to deliver IT services
Increasing range of threats

3. Continuity planning - objective
“The objective of business continuity planning is to ensure that key business activities are restored and maintained as quickly as possible following any major disaster or failure that affects essential services or facilities”.
A code of practice for Information Security Management, British Standards Institution

4. Causes of business continuity failures include :-
What can go wrong?
Causes of business continuity failures include :-
hardware failure (22%)
flood (19%)
power outage (15%)
hurricane (11%)
fire/explosion (8%)
earthquake (6%)
bomb blast (5%)
COMDISCO

5. For government sector computer systems :-
Who might be affected?
For government sector computer systems :-
the general public
the government
businesses
law and order/air traffic control/hospitals/etc

6. Top managements’ reaction?
Too expensive
Disaster unlikely to happen
More important things to do
We will ‘muddle through’
Unaware of the business risks

7. The ingredients of continuity planning?
People
Time
Money
Business
Systems
The
Environment
Corporate
Information

8. The economics Continuity planing costs :-
risk assessment
developing the plan
additional countermeasures
recovery support contracts
training and publicity
testing the plan
maintaining the plan
The plan must relate to business needs

9. Continuity planning life-cycle
Preliminary work
Business Impact Review
Recovery Options Review
Develop the plan
Awareness and testing
Analyse test
results
Update
the plan

10. Summary Importance - reliance on IT; pressures; threats
Objective - restore key business systems within an acceptable timeframe
Contingency versus Continuity
Ingredients - resources; systems; environment; information
Economics - must relate to business needs
Development and maintenance life cycle