Business Continuity

Office Wave Technology's goal is to ensure the continuation of business activities despite serious incidents or disasters. In order to ensure this Office Wave Technology Solutions offers an approach based on 3 key elements :

  1. Resilience: critical business functions and the supporting infrastructure are designed and engineered in such a way that they are materially unaffected by most disruptions, for example through the use of redundancy and spare capacity; for example having all critical systems setup in a minimum of RAID 1 (mirrored drives), ensuring backup systems (secondary servers) are put in place in order to "fail - over to" in case of a disaster, ensuring battery backups are placed on all critical systems in case of power failure and ensuring all systems .

  2. Recovery: arrangements are made to recover or restore critical and less critical business functions that fail for some reason. Generally most backup solutions provide ways in which recoveries can be made, however testing and ensuring these backup systems work properly is critical.

  3. Contingency: the organization establishes a generalized capability and readiness to cope effectively with whatever major incidents and disasters occur, including those that were not, and perhaps could not have been, foreseen. Contingency preparations constitute a last-resort response if resilience and recovery arrangements should prove inadequate in practice. Ensuring the potential and tested availability of information outside of the current location is key to the continuation of any business.

If there is no Business Continuity plan implemented and the organization in question is facing a rather severe threat or disruption that may lead to bankruptcy, the implementation and outcome, if not too late, may strengthen the organization's survival and its continuity of business activities (Gittleman, 2013).


For more information feel free to contact us :

(866) 291-1968
info@office-wave.com

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For more information feel free to contact us :
(866) 291-1968 info@office-wave.com

Calin Popescu

IT Generalist
calin@office-wave.com
(866) 291-1968 ext. 101

Rob Hepburn

Business Development Manager
rob@office-wave.com
(866) 291-1968 ext. 102

 

Articles

From time to time we will be posting interesting articles in this section.

What is Business Continuity?

The Government of Canada provides some great information in respect to Business Continuity. Their defintion available here is :
Critical services or products are those that must be delivered to ensure survival, avoid causing injury, and meet legal or other obligations of an organization. Business Continuity Planning is a proactive planning process that ensures critical services or products are delivered during a disruption. A Business Continuity Plan includes:

  1. Plans, measures and arrangements to ensure the continuous delivery of critical services and products, which permits the organization to recover its facility, data and assets.
  2. Identification of necessary resources to support business continuity, including personnel, information, equipment, financial allocations, legal counsel, infrastructure protection and accommodations.
Having a BCP enhances an organization's image with employees, shareholders and customers by demonstrating a proactive attitude. Additional benefits include improvement in overall organizational efficiency and identifying the relationship of assets and human and financial resources to critical services and deliverables.

What is the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

A Disaster Recovery Plan deals with recovering Information Technology (IT) assets after a disastrous interruption. Both imply a stoppage in critical operations and are reactive.
Recognizing that some services or products must be continuously delivered without interruption, there has been a shift from Business Resumption Planning to Business Continuity Planning.
A business continuity plan enables critical services or products to be continually delivered to clients. Instead of focusing on resuming a business after critical operations have ceased, or recovering after a disaster, a business continuity plan endeavors to ensure that critical operations continue to be available.

What is Important in a Business Continuity Plan?

  1. Document internal key personnel and backups. These are people who fill positions without which your business absolutely cannot function – make the list as large as necessary but as small as possible.
  2. Identify who can telecommute. Some people in your company might be perfectly capable of conducting business from a home office. Find out who can and who cannot.
  3. Document external contacts. If you have critical vendors or contractors, build a special contact list that includes a description of the company (or individual) and any other absolutely critical information about them including key personnel contact information.
  4. Document critical equipment. Personal computers often contain critical information (you do have off-site backups, don’t you?).
  5. Identify critical documents. Articles of incorporation and other legal papers, utility bills, banking information, critical HR documents, building lease papers, tax returns...you need to have everything available that would be necessary to start your business over again.
  6. Identify contingency equipment options. If your company uses trucks, and it is possible the trucks might be damaged in a building fire, where would you rent trucks? Where would you rent computers? Can you use a business service outlet for copies, fax, printing, and other critical functions?
  7. Identify your contingency location. This is the place you will conduct business while your primary offices are unavailable.
  8. Make a "How-to". It should include step-by-step instructions on what to do, who should do it, and how.
  9. Put the information together! A BCP is useless if all the information is scattered about in different places. A BCP is a reference document – it should all be kept together and available (paper copy within organization, secondary location paper copy, off-site digital copy i.e. dropbox, google drive, one drive etc.) .
  10. Communicate. Make sure everyone in your company knows the BCP.
  11. Test the plan! You’ve put really good ideas down, accumulated all your information, ensured all backups are completed, identified contingency locations, listed your personnel, contacts and service companies, but can you pull it off?
  12. Plan to change the plan. No matter how good your plan is, and no matter how smoothly your test runs, it is likely there will be events outside your plan. The hotel you plan to use for your contingency site is hosting a huge convention. You can’t get into the bank because the disaster happened on a banking holiday. The power is out in your house. The copy machine at the business services company is broken. Your IT consultant is on vacation
  13. Review and revise. Every time something changes, update all copies of your BCP.

Interesting Links/Articles

Business Continuity Checklist (PDF) http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/bsnss-cntnt-plnnng/index-eng.aspx
BDC Emergency and DR Plan
Search Disaster Recovery TechTarget
SANS WHITE PAPER(PDF)

Older Documents/Articles

 

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