IT continuity planning is the process that ensures continuous operations of business applications and supporting IT systems (i.e., desktops, printers, network devices). IT continuity planning is a subset of enterprise business continuity planning. A business continuity plan is an enterprise-wide group of processes and instructions to ensure the continuation of business processes in the event of an interruption.
IT continuity plans are designed to reduce the impact of a major disruption on key business functions and processes. The plans are based on risk understanding of potential business impacts and address requirements for resilience, alternative processing and recovery capability of all critical IT services. They also cover usage guidelines, roles and responsibilities, procedures, communication processes, and the testing approach.
Quick IT Continuity Facts
- Natural Disasters account for only 1% of all data loss while hardware failure, human error, security breaches or viruses account for the majority
- 52% of businesses experience multiple backup failures every year
- Every week 140,000 hard drives crash in the US
- US businesses lose over 12 billion per year because of data loss
- Network downtime costs 80% of small and medium-sized businesses at least $20,000 per hour
Why Implement IT Continuity Management?
Organizations implementing IT continuity management see following benefits:
- Builds confidence among your customers
- Builds confidence among your employees
- Prepares your organization against possible data theft or loss
- Prepares your organization against cyber attacks
- Helps mitigate your financial risk
- Gives you a competitive advantage
- Cultivates a resilient organizational culture
What is ISO 27031?
ISO/IEC 27031 describes the concepts and principles of information and communication technology (ICT) readiness for business continuity, and provides a framework of methods and processes to identify and specify all aspects (such as performance criteria, design, and implementation) for improving an organization’s ICT readiness to ensure business continuity.
Business Beam helps in effective implementation of IT continuity
We help you to implement IT continuity based on ISO 27031 standard. Our highly customized and tailored approach helps organizations in quickly and effectively ensuring continuity of their IT operations against disastrous events.
Salient features of our service are as follows:
- Executive Advisory: Our experienced leaders are expert in organizational change management. They discuss and understand your most important and complex service management issues and provide strategic advice for success.
- IT Continuity Governance: We ensure Executive Management involvement and commitment through strategic level IT continuity policies, planning, goals setting, definition of roles and responsibilities, and supporting action plans.
- Business Impact Assessment: BIA provides baseline data about the time critical IT services. With the help of predeveloped tools and templates, we ensure that the BIA process is completed quickly and effectively in coordination with process owners.
- Risk Assessment: Continuity risk assessment helps in identifying and evaluating risk of disruption to the organization’s prioritized IT services and assets. Our consultants perform comprehensive risk assessment and planning.
- IT Continuity Plans: In coordination with practitioner, our consultants develop IT continuity strategies and plans, based on agreed continuity strategies. We also develop continuity policies and procedures to ensure that the continuity plans are followed and updated on regular basis.
- Workshops: We plan multiple informal awareness workshops for practitioners on continuity implementation. Specialized courses like ISO 22301 Lead Implementer, ISO 27031 Lead Implementer, etc. deliver additional value.
- Testing of IT Continuity Plans: IT continuity management system is not effective unless it is not properly tested by the staff. We provide training, coaching and hand holding support before and during the testing phase. We also help in developing post-test reports.
- Performance Management: Performance measurement is a key for any management system to achieve its business outcomes. We help in designing a performance management system based on KPIs, KRIs, metrics and dashboards for corrective and preventive actions.
- Sustenance Support: Implementing a standard is only beginning of the journey, sustaining the same over time is even a bigger challenge. After successful implementation, we provide sustenance support ensuring continual improvements and long-lasting culture adoption.
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