Defense Logistics Information Service Business Continuity Plan Essay

while the rest of the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) kicks in. A BCP has a much broader scope and takes

Our company’s Continuity Management Program (CMP) dictates that the business adheres to an annual testing program. The program does utilize the guidelines from the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP). The Continuity Management team has written and scripted into our process to incorporate our Tabletop Exercise’s (TTX’s). Our annual process is to test each of our business units for resiliency. TTX’s allows for us to open up discussions and dialogues focusing on many different areas in the event we need to declare. Also, the exercises aid in discovering any gaps and working through each tier of the recovery process. Our business lines have Recovery Time Objectives (RTO’s) starting at 1 hour up to 72 hours. During the TTX’s we cover the business impact analysis (BIA’s ) and each of the RTO’s.

BCA devices are updated every 2 hours. Reports can be generated from the stored info in the BCA. Each department is stocked with all needed backup paperwork to use in downtimes. Data storage will be kept in our on-site IT command center.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR or BC/DR) are closely related practices that describe an organization's preparation for unforeseen risks to continued operations. The trend of combining business continuity and disaster recovery into a single term has resulted from a growing recognition that both business executives and technology executives need to be collaborating closely instead of developing plans in isolation.

The overall objective of the BIA is to identify the impact of outages. More specifically, the goal is to identify the critical functions that can affect the organization. After these you can identify the critical resources that support these functions. Each resource has a MAO and impact if it fails. The ultimate goal is to identify the recovery requirements.

What is the purpose of having a Business Continuity Plan policy definition that defines the organization’s Business Impact Analysis? To identify critical business functions and what disruptions in the services can have on the organization.

For the task of creating a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), I will follow a logical and systematic formula for implementation, monitoring and reviewing the plan for United Health Group.

What kind of risk does a BCP help mitigate? The interruption of business critical operations or process. The BCP helps in planning and testing of procedures to allow business to continue during a disaster. The prevention of lost data, and services not available for customers.

2. Why is a business impact analysis (BIA) an important first step in defining a business continuity plan (BCP)?? It allows you to address the critical issues and possible risks

In this day and age, a business continuity plan is essential to an organizations risk management. A large organization like Sunshine Machine Works understand that time is critical when it comes to natural disasters or man made interruptions to their network systems. When a system is offline for excessive amounts of time, could mean a loss to the organization. That’s why having an effective business continuity plan is vital to keeping operations for being disturbed during a time of crisis whether it is an attack or natural disaster that could potentially affect Sunshine Machine Works operations, data and networks.

The significance of each major phase of continuity planning merits attention because each phase contributes to building all four areas of business continuity: disaster recovery, business recovery, business resumption, and contingency planning:

As a consultant brought into an organization concerned about business continuity I would recommend to first perform a Risk Assessment Analysis and/or Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Conducting a business impact analysis will allow an organization to know the system or application’s downtime tolerance. The analysis will identify all systems and applications that can experience little to no downtime. Conducting risk assessment analysis will allow the organization to identify all the risks at the beginning and during the life of the organization, and grade the risks in terms of likelihood of occurring and seriousness of impact on the organization. Either analysis is an excellent tool and will result in the beginning creations of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. If using the BIA method a good first step is identifying the business’ most crucial systems and processes to assess what effect the outages will have on the business. All systems or applications should have a back-up location offsite to ensure business continuity. The higher the impact the more money a company should spend in order to quickly gain restoration of their business.

Owning a business can have many stressors day to day. When starting a business there is a lot of planning and preparation involved. Many small businesses are owners who have put their own money into the business and look at it as an investment. Unfortunately with all the planning that goes into starting a business, one thing is often over looked. Most of the time the “what ifs”, are not part of the planning stage. One reason for this is that people do not like to think of the bad things that could or may happen. So with all the time and planning put into starting a business why not put some extra thought into a plan B if a disaster strikes? This plan B could be a business continuity plan or a disaster recovery plan. Business continuity plans are an essential part of the modern day business. There are so many potential disasters for small businesses that could seize the production or even close the business down for good. A recent study from Gartner Inc., found that “90% of companies that experience data loss go out of business within two years. It also found that 80% of company owners have not thought about how they would keep their businesses up and running if a data disaster occurs.” According to the Association of Records Managers and Administrators, “about 60 percent of businesses that experience a major disaster such as a fire close

DLIS has decided to develop a business continuity plan (BCP) with the full support of management.

We worked with the utility to perform a BIA to identify critical business processes, the likelihood of service disruption, and the projected cost of loss. We then helped the utility understand the business risks of systems and technology services interruption.