Having current and complete information during a crisis is vital for quick and effective response and recovery.

However, a common complaint of many business continuity managers is that business continuity management (BCM) plans are outdated because they haven’t been updated to account for current business availability needs, or they are stored in multiple places throughout the enterprise, making it hard to keep them current without a strong document management process. Having an enterprise wide BCM plan management strategy assisted by automation can ensure that BCM plans are current, viable and available during a crisis.

Key findings:

• Many organisations know that their BCM plans are outdated and are concerned that they won’t be able to recover from a disaster if these plans are used.
• The complexity of the enterprise and the interrelatedness of information needed for response and recovery efforts further challenge successful recovery, and therefore, the long-term viability of the enterprise.
• Too few organisations are planning for an outage time frame longer than seven days.
• Automation can assist in developing, maintaining and exercising BCM plans according to
  business needs.

Recommendations:

• Develop a distributed, collaborative BCM organisational model.
• Communicate the business value of BCM.
• Build BCM plan management into the business/project life cycle.
• Develop a structured framework of plans.
• Keep plans relevant to the purpose.
• Build simple but detailed plans to be used by the second-tier workforce.
• Establish a central repository and plan an administration process.
• Implement business continuity management planning (BCMP) and crisis/incident management tools.
• Exercise BCM plans once a year at minimum.

Building resilienct into your IT environment

Traditionally, enterprises have taken a segmented approach to reducing risk and managing IT performance, adding point technology and reactive services for disaster recovery, data protection, IT availability, and security. Yet in HP’s experience, these functions are interdependent; they all affect the viability of critical business processes and should be addressed in an integrated, systemic way. Technology is one part of the solution, but the right staff skills, procedures, and IT processes must be in place as well. After all, when it comes to downtime, your IT environment is only as strong as its weakest link.

Think of business continuity, availability, and security as a way of life part of your company’s culture. When you take a comprehensive view of service levels and operational risk, you can optimise your entire IT environment, lower IT costs, and increase agility.

HP’s approach to business continuity, availability, and security is holistic, proactive, and focused on continuous improvement to help you deliver value to your business. Through our broad portfolio of technology and services and our extensive partnerships, we help you manage operational risk and build a flexible, resilient IT environment. With HP’s integrated strategy, you can lay the foundation for an Adaptive Enterprise, where IT and business are closely aligned to help you capitalise on change.

Lanway/HP's tiered approach - helping you invest at the right level!

Lanway recommends HP solutions for business continuity, availability, and security based on four factors:

• Level of availability and access needed
• Amount of data a business can afford to lose in case of a disruption (recovery point objective RPO)
• Length of time the business can afford to be down (recovery time objective RTO)
• Level of security required to protect data

We have defined three tiers to use as guidelines in assessing the level of service you need to deliver to your business:

Tier 1: when planned or unplanned downtime would threaten your viability or have a long-term impact on your financial position or market credibility. Examples are revenue-producing or mission-critical processes such as Internet store-fronts, billing applications, emergency systems, telecommunications infrastructures, financial trading environments, and healthcare patient records.

HP helps you achieve the highest level of secure and continuous computing: zero RTO, zero RPO, and less than 10 minutes per month downtime.

Tier 2: when any downtime causes significant damage to the business or affects multiple departments. Examples include supply chain processes, Microsoft® Exchange environments, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

HP helps you achieve high levels of secure and continuous computing: less than 8 hours RTO, 1 hour RPO, and 1 hour downtime per month.

Tier 3: when a stable, available environment is required, but downtime can be tolerated occasionally without causing serious damage to your business. Examples include core but non-critical processes such as back-office functions (payroll, internal systems, and procurement).

HP helps you achieve resilient levels of secure and continuous computing: less than 72 hours RTO, 24 hours RPO, and 2 hours downtime per month.

With HP’s tiered approach, you get the right technology and service solutions to deliver the performance and resilience your business needs, with an exceptional return on investment.

Need help getting started? Let us help you address your critical needs, then design a plan that matches your objectives. Click on the link above and get one of our highly trained staff to call you back to discuss.