Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

Business continuity planning is best described as the process and procedures that any organization put in place to ensure that essential business functions continue to operate during and after a disaster of any kind.  By having a BCP, organizations seek to prevent interruption of mission critical services.  This type of planning enables them to re-establish services to a fully functional level as quickly and smoothly as possible.  BCPs should cover all key business segments of the organization's critical business processes and operations.

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Part of the business continuity process, the organization should normally develop a series of procedures which reflect the level of business recovery plans.  These are more technical plans that are developed for specific groups within an organization to allow them to recover a particular business application.  One of the most critical DRP's is the Information Technology (IT) DRP.  Other business areas requiring specific DRPs include call centers, warehouses, distribution centers and any other areas of specialized activities.

Core Technology with its intensive experience in the development of BCP and DRP's is ready help their clients in establishing their own Business Continuity Plan as well as providing the on-going consultancy to ensure a successful testing of such plans.

For customers who do not have the infrastructure to set and operate their dedicated disaster recovery centre, Core Technology has the solution. Through close coordination with a number of data centers world-wide, arrangement can be made to host the clients systems at one of our state-of-the art fully managed data centre.  We have arrangement for local, regional and international data centre.

Typical BCP Life Cycle

On-Going Review of Existing BCP

If your organization already has an existing Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for part or all of its business activities, this BCP needs to be thoroughly reviewed. The purpose of this review is to determine whether the existing BCP can effectively meet the organization's current and projected business needs. Always, management need to remember that the date when the existing plan was originally prepared should be noted, together with the date when it was last updated.   As you business grows, or your systems and procedures change, your BCP must be updated to reflect the last change.

 The BCP should have a recognizable structure including a detailed section on incident and risk assessment covering all the organization's key business activities. The BCP should cover and document strategy for recovery of the organization's full range of business processes including IT systems, communications, business information, production, sales, accounts, customer service levels and public relations etc., etc. There should be a section on dealing with the Disaster Recovery Phase with instructions to the Disaster Recovery Team. The BCP should document the required process for handover from the Disaster Recovery Team to the Business Recovery Team in order to commence the business recovery activities. This section should contain detailed instructions during the business recovery process for assessment and prioritization, recovery activities, notification and reporting, and project organization.

 However, for those organization's who does not have a tested BCP in place, our recommendation is to start implementing one before its too late.