What is business continuity?

Business continuity describes an organizations plans to ensure that mission critical functions can continue during and after a disaster.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) seeks to achieve the following:

•Prevent interruption of mission-critical services

•Re-establish fully functioning plans as swiftly and smoothly as possible

Disasters can be caused by any of the following:

•Natural causes such as floods, fires and earthquakes

•Systems-related causes such as network problems and power or telecommunications failures

• Logical outages such as virus attacks, memory leaks and data corruption, etc.

Disasters can result in large monetary losses, legal ramifications, loss of customer confidence and, in some extreme cases, the company’s existence. Organizations therefore need to have plans to recover their assets, which include people, facilities, business applications, processes and IT systems, so that they can return to normal business operations as soon as possible. All this requires Business Continuity Planning (BCP).

How can enterprises protect themselves against factors such as war, natural disasters and political disputes, as well as issues such as server failures, rolling power cuts and malicious attacks?

Most people think of disasters caused by war, natural disasters and political disputes when they think of risks to their business. In most cases, though, server failures, power cuts and malicious attacks can also lead to major interruptions of normal business operations. Hundreds of companies invoke their business continuity plans every year in response to severe or extremely severe disasters. However, being prepared with BCP before disaster strikes is increasingly becoming essential for all business organizations. Historically and for well-understood reasons, BCP has resided in the IT department. For this reason, most companies have some disaster recovery alternatives for their IT systems.

• The most common disaster recovery alternative used is off-site data storage where data is backed up on a regular basis onto a tape or disk and kept at a location away from the business location.

• Several other technology alternatives for IT recovery are available, such as hot and cold sites, electronic vaulting, shadowing, mirroring and disk-to-disk remote copy. However, they’re not used by as many corporations. Given the nature of today’s enterprise and the need to manage a much broader set of risks, BCP needs to go beyond disaster recovery planning and recognize that IT is just one essential component in BCP.

To effectively recover from a disaster requires -

• Planning and mitigation of all critical assets, including people, facilities, business applications, procedures and IT systems. Doing so requires the cooperation of the company’s management at all levels as well as involvement of most, if not all, of its value-chain partners, including vendors and suppliers.

• Business managers and IT managers have to work together on business continuity. BCP needs to be considered as part of strategic planning, rather than as an afterthought.

74% of respondents stated that actual disruptions are due to failure of hardware/software
(Source: eHDF BCM Survey 2009)

Why is it important and how are developments such as cloud computing affecting how enterprises use it?

Many companies went out of business because they didn’t prepare for major disruptions caused by natural calamities such as flood and earthquakes and manmade disruption such as war, widespread power failures, etc.

Business Continuity Management is designed to reduce organization’s risk from unexpected disruptions on its critical business functions and to ensure continuity of business during disasters.

By implementing Business Continuity Planning, business can increase recovery capabilities dramatically. That means you can make the right decisions quickly, cut downtime and minimize financial losses. Preparedness is the key. It gives confidence. Having Business Continuity Management (BCM) in place demonstrates a duty of care to your customers and suppliers.

A move toward more and more services in the cloud is inevitable, but vendors still need to focus on security and privacy laws have to be rewritten to protect cloud customers. Cloud computing will offer many benefits, including:

• Agility, Adoptability & Flexibility

• Remote access to data

• Remote collaboration

• Reduced IT costs

At the same time, while using cloud computing, enterprises have to keep the following factors in mind:

•Data privacy laws differ significantly between countries

•Generally cloud environments are highly virtualized. Virtualization in cloud computing environments could also lead to data leaks between customers if the virtualization isn’t done correctly

•Cloud providers can become potential targets for cybercriminals and hackers and hence the continuity of business in such situations should be planned well ahead

•Cloud underlying network security should be understood well

•Needs careful due diligence

How can your products help ClOs and what makes your products different from your competitors?

eHosting DataFort has been working with clients for both disaster recovery and business continuity. Partnership with Double Take Software, a leading provider of affordable disaster recovery and business continuity solutions helps customers with end-to-end solutions to recover business critical systems.

Compared to competition, eHDF sets itself apart by offering both an analysis and a solution. BCP/DR Consultancy is provided from an early stage of the business stepping in before a disaster occurs. This prepares business and IT systems with both disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.

What factors do Middle East ClOs need to consider when implementing a business continuity strategy?

A business continuity plan is essential for an organisation’s image with employees, shareholders and customers because it demonstrates a proactive attitude.

With BCP, risks are identified even though mitigation is limited. This doesn’t stop laying plans for unidentified and undesirable situations. By doing so, the impact of the damage can be minimised.

Realistic business continuity strategies should be implemented. Having state-of-the-art technologies might not serve your purpose if a simple manual business process can’t be restored. Therefore, think pragmatic whilst strategising business continuity planning.

The following factors have to be considered while preparing a Business Continuity Plan which mainly includes:

• Firstly ensure the safety of people

• Role/Functional recovery

• Mission critical services and products have to be ensured by plans, measures and arrangements allowing the organization to recover its facility, data and assets.

• Resources and arrangement have to be identified to support business continuity including personnel, information, and equipment, arrangements with vendors, government authorities, financial allocations, legal counsel, infrastructure protection and accommodations.

• Incorporate BC processes into existing processes such as Change Management, Incident management etc. as changes may have impact on BC plans.

• People involvement during the preparation