In your busiest months have you planned for any downtime? Do you have a business continuity plan in place?

Business continuity is a proactive plan which focuses on the long term operational issues of a business. Companies put a risk management plan in place which identifies the people, processes and technology required to continue business operations in the event of any interruption.

Business critical applications are always the most important, in most cases the system can be split into three tiers:

• Tier 1 – systems that are the highest priority and include those IT assets that would put the business at risk with even the briefest outage.
• Tier 2 – system outages are ones the business can tolerate. They can last a few hours or several days before the organisation is impacted.
• Tier 3 – systems can be down for longer periods and are generally noticeable only to IT.

To then build a plan that will work, businesses need to:

1. Look at the policies and standards from the organizations risk management policies
2. Develop the business continuity plan:
   1. Document any processes and show the how they fit in the plan.
   2. Identify and communicate with stake holders and SME’s.
   3. Build consensus on continuity and recovery priority, and recovery time objectives (RTO).
3. Implement the necessary changes to support the goals of the plan.

Once businesses have these points established and in place, along with their IT team, they can build a contingency plan that will be effective should something go wrong. Don’t let a disaster happen!

Get in touch

If you would like information on a disaster recovery assessment, Evaris can help. We offer advice and support relating to a wide range of IT products and services. Contact us today by calling 0330 124 1245, or email [email protected].