Business Continuity Planning Software

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Business continuity planning software comparison

Business continuity planning^[1]^[2] (or business continuity and resiliency planning) is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company.^[3] In addition to prevention, the goal is to enable ongoing operations before and during execution of disaster recovery.^[4]

An organization's resistance to failure is 'the ability .. to withstand changes in its environment and still function'.^[5] Often called resilience, it is a capability that enables organizations to either endure environmental changes without having to permanently adapt, or the organization is forced to adapt a new way of working that better suits the new environmental conditions.^[5]

1Overview
3Analysis
- 3.1Business impact analysis (BIA)
6Current British standards
8Implementation and testing
9Maintenance
12Further reading

Overview[edit]

Any event that could negatively impact operations should be included in the plan, such as supply chain interruption, loss of or damage to critical infrastructure (major machinery or computing /network resource). As such, BCP is a subset of risk management.^[6] In the US, government entities refer to the process as continuity of operations planning (COOP).^[7] A Business Continuity Plan^[8] outlines a range of disaster scenarios and the steps the business will take in any particular scenario to return to regular trade. BCP's are written ahead of time and can also include precautions to be put in place. Usually created with the input of key staff as well as stakeholders, a BCP is a set of contingencies to minimize potential harm to businesses during adverse scenarios.^[9]

Resilience[edit]

A 2005 analysis of how disruptions can adversely affect the operations of corporations and how investments in resilience can give a competitive advantage over entities not prepared for various contingencies^[10] extended then-common business continuity planning practices. Business organizations such as the Council on Competitiveness embraced this resilience goal.^[11]

Adapting to change in an apparently slower, more evolutionary manner - sometimes over many years or decades - has been described as being more resilient^[12], and the term 'strategic resilience' is now used to go beyond resisting a one-time crisis, but rather continuously anticipating and adjusting, 'before the case for change becomes desperately obvious.'

This approach is sometimes summarized as: preparedness,^[13] protection, response and recovery.^[14]

Business continuity[edit]

Business continuity is the intended outcome of proper execution of Business continuity planning and Disaster recovery. It is the payoff for cost-effective buying of spare machines and servers, performing backups and bringing them off-site, assigning responsibility, performing drills, educating employees and being vigilant.

A major cost in planning for this is the preparation of audit compliance management documents; automation tools are available to reduce the time and cost associated with manually producing this information.

Several business continuity standards have been published by various standards bodies to assist in checklisting these ongoing tasks.^[15]

Inventory[edit]

Planners must have information about:

Equipment
Supplies and suppliers
Documents and documentation, including which have off-site backup copies:^[8]
- Business documents
- Procedure documentation

Analysis[edit]

The analysis phase consists of

impact analysis
threat analysis and
impact scenarios.

Quantifying of loss ratios must also include 'dollars to defend a lawsuit.'^[16] It has been estimated that a dollar spent in loss prevention can prevent 'seven dollars of disaster-related economic loss.'^[17]

Business impact analysis (BIA)[edit]

A Business impact analysis (BIA) differentiates critical (urgent) and non-critical (non-urgent) organization functions/activities. A function may be considered critical if dictated by law.

For each function, two values are assigned:

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – the acceptable latency of data that will not be recovered. For example, is it acceptable for the company to lose 2 days of data?^[18] The recovery point objective must ensure that the maximum tolerable data loss for each activity is not exceeded.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – the acceptable amount of time to restore the function.

Maximum RTO[edit]

Maximum time constraints for how long an enterprise's key products or services can be unavailable or undeliverable before stakeholders perceive unacceptable consequences have been named as: Kamen rider ooo games.

Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPoD)
Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD)
Maximum Tolerable Outage (MTO)
Maximum Allowable Outage (MAO)^[19]^[20]

According to ISO 22301 the terms maximum acceptable outage and maximum tolerable period of disruption mean the same thing and are defined using exactly the same words.^[21]

Consistency[edit]

When more than one system crashes, recovery plans must balance the need for data consistency with other objectives, such as RTO and RPO.^[22]Recovery Consistency Objective (RCO) is the name of this goal. It applies data consistency objectives, to define a measurement for the consistency of distributed business data within interlinked systems after a disaster incident. Similar terms used in this context are 'Recovery Consistency Characteristics' (RCC) and 'recovery object granularity' (ROG).^[23]

While RTO and RPO are absolute per-system values, RCO is expressed as a percentage that measures the deviation between actual and targeted state of business data across systems for process groups or individual business processes.

The following formula calculates RCO with 'n' representing the number of business processes and 'entities' representing an abstract value for business data: ${displaystyle {text{RCO}}=1-{frac {({text{number of inconsistent entities}})_{n}}{({text{number of entities}})_{n}}}}$

100% RCO means that post recovery, no business data deviation occurs.^[24]

Threat and risk analysis (TRA)[edit]

After defining recovery requirements, each potential threat may require unique recovery steps. Common threats include:

Fire
Sabotage (insider or external threat)
Hurricane or other major storm
Water outage (supply interruption, contamination)
Telecomms outage
IT outage
Terrorism/Piracy
War/civil disorder
Theft (insider or external threat, vital information or material)
Random failure of mission-critical systems
Single point dependency
Supplier failure

The above areas can cascade: Responders can stumble. Supplies may become depleted. During the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, some organizations compartmentalized and rotated teams to match the incubation period of the disease. They also banned in-person contact during both business and non-business hours. This increased resiliency against the threat.

Impact scenarios[edit]

Impact scenarios are identified and documented:

need for medical supplies^[25]
need for transportion options^[26]
civilian impact of nuclear disasters^[27]
need for business and data processing supplies^[28]

These should reflect the widest possible damage.

Tiers of preparedness[edit]

SHARE's seven tiers of disaster recovery^[29] released in 1992, were updated in 2012 by IBM as an eight tier model:^[30]

Tier 0 - Nothing off-site.. 'recovery time . unpredictable ..' - may not be possible.
Tier 1 - What IBM calls 'PTAM (Pickup Truck Access Method)' - but a hot site (backup hardware).
Tier 2 - Hot site - will require hours or even days to load the most recent backup tapes.
Tier 3 - Transaction data at the off-site is kept relatively current via an ongoing high-speed data link (electronic vaulting) and 'an automated tape library at the remote site.'
Tier 4 - 'Point-in-time copies' so that less reprocessing of transactions will be needed.
Tier 5 - 'Transaction integrity' - the hot site is kept as up-to-the-moment as possible.
Tier 6 - 'Zero or Near-zero data loss'
Tier 7 - 'Highly automated' recovery - few if any manual steps following a main site failure; rollover to running at the hot site is automatic.

Solution design[edit]

Two main requirements from the impact analysis stage are:

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For IT: the minimum application and data requirements and the time in which they must be available.
Outside IT: preservation of hard copy (such as contracts). A process plant must consider skilled staff and embedded technology.

This phase overlaps with disaster recovery planning.

The solution phase determines:

crisis management command structure
telecommunication architecture between primary and secondary work sites
data replication methodology between primary and secondary work sites
Backup site - applications, data and work space required at the secondary work site

Current British standards[edit]

The British Standards Institution (BSI) released a series of standards:

BS 7799, peripherally addressed information security procedures.
2006: BCP—BS 25999-1,
2007: BS 25999-2 'Specification for Business Continuity Management', which specifies requirements for implementing, operating and improving a documented business continuity management system (BCMS).
2008: BS25777, specifically to align computer continuity with business continuity. (withdrawn March 2011)
2011: ISO/IEC 27031 - Security techniques — Guidelines for information and communication technology readiness for business continuity.
July 2014: BS EN ISO 22301:2014, the current standard for business continuity planning.^[31]

ITIL has defined some of these terms.^[32]

Within the UK, BS 25999-2:2007 and BS 25999-1:2006 used for business continuity management across all organizations, industries and sectors. These documents give a practical plan to deal with most eventualities—from extreme weather conditions to terrorism, IT system failure, and staff sickness.^[33]

Civil Contingencies Act[edit]

In 2004, following crises in the preceding years, the UK government passed the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004: Businesses must have continuity planning measures to survive and continue to thrive whilst working towards keeping the incident as minimal as possible.^[34]

The Act was separated into two parts:

Part 1: civil protection, covering roles & responsibilities for local responders
Part 2: emergency powers

Australia and New Zealand[edit]

United Kingdom and Australia^[35] have incorporated resilience into their continuity planning.^[36]^[37] In the United Kingdom, resilience is implemented locally by the Local Resilience Forum.

In New Zealand, the Canterbury University Resilient Organisations programme developed an assessment tool for benchmarking the Resilience of Organisations.^[38] It covers 11 categories, each having 5 to 7 questions. A Resilience Ratio summarizes this evaluation.^[39]

Implementation and testing[edit]

The implementation phase involves policy changes, material acquisitions, staffing and testing.

Testing and organizational acceptance[edit]

The 2008 book Exercising for Excellence, published by The British Standards Institution identified three types of exercises that can be employed when testing business continuity plans.

Tabletop exercises - a small number of people concentrate on a specific aspect of a BCP. Another form involves a single representative from each of several teams.
Medium exercises - Several departments, teams or disciplines concentrate on multiple BCP aspects; the scope can range from a few teams from one building to multiple teams operating across dispersed locations. Pre-scripted 'surprises' are added.
Complex exercises - All aspects of a medium exercise remain, but for maximum realism no-notice activation, actual evacuation and actual invocation of a disaster recovery site is added.

While start and stop times are pre-agreed, the actual duration might be unknown if events are allowed to run their course.

Maintenance[edit]

Biannual or annual maintenance cycle maintenance of a BCP manual^[35] is broken down into three periodic activities.

Confirmation of information in the manual, roll out to staff for awareness and specific training for critical individuals.
Testing and verification of technical solutions established for recovery operations.
Testing and verification of organization recovery procedures.

Issues found during the testing phase often must be reintroduced to the analysis phase.

Information/targets[edit]

The BCP manual must evolve with the organization, and maintain information about who has to know what