Information On Continuity Of Operations For An Organization

While these situations are not entirely avoidable, an organization’s ability to recover from such setbacks largely depends on how much energy has been invested into identifying and mitigating risk through the use of a well-established business continuity plan. Lindros and Tittel (2013) explain that business continuity refers to maintaining business functions, or quickly recovering such functions in the event of a major disruption, and the lack of planning doesn’t just mean an organization will take longer to recover, but may never recover at all. The first step to developing an effective continuity plan is a thorough planning process in which an organization establishes

Summary: For this assignment, you must research three or more commercially available technology solutions which could be used by a business as part of its recovery during disaster recovery or business continuity operations. You may focus upon the incident reported upon in your cybersecurity research paper OR you may take a more general approach. Your research will then be used to prepare a presentation (Power Point slides) in which you discuss how your selected solutions could be used to address cybersecurity problems specific to DR / BCP operations. Your presentation must also address the importance of disaster recovery planning and/or business continuity planning with respect to maintaining the

In the event of disruption to the Network infrastructure, this plan describes the strategy and procedures for recovering vital information systems, records, and data.

5. Of the three System/Application Domain risks, threats, and vulnerabilities identified, which one requires a disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan to maintain continued operations during a catastrophic outage?

“Business continuity planning is the process of ensuring that your organization can continue doing business even when its normal facilities or place of business is unavailable” (Peltier, 2014). This statement should hold true for any business wishing to compete in today’s market and apply to more than just natural disasters. Although natural disasters should remain an integral part of any continuity plan and recovery model, other man-made disasters, such as computer viruses and physical security should be considered.

A BCP may be written for business processes within a single business unit or may address the entire organization’s processes. The BCP may also be scoped to address only the functions deemed to be priorities. A BCP is an ongoing commitment with no established start and end date. NIST has outlined the seven progressive steps needed to maintain an effective contingency plan for all information systems. The seven steps are as follows (Swanson, Bowen, Phillips, Gallup, & Lynes, 2010):

Business enterprises depend on information to survive and to ensure business continuity. However, in IT protecting information from disasters is a constant challenge. In spite of having adequate data backup and storage, companies face business disruptions and useful data is lost. Thoughtful planning and collaboration of people at all levels in the organization can help to develop comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans

An important aspect I want to review is the disaster recovery plan. This plan is different from business continuity but some features do overlap. A disaster recovery plan prepares the business to recover their IT systems and assets after a disaster. Beginning with Wilma Stone, Margie Nelson, and Gary Thomas as management they need to meet with their IT department heads and perform a risk assessment to identify IT equipment and services that are critical to business operations. Identifying these critical components will give an initial point to recovery. As these are essential to business operations, the chosen IT systems should be priority in prevention, response, and during recovery. Charts and documents will help organize this and inform staff on the involved areas.

The CIOB should develop a Disaster Recovery Plan to support the Company’s Business Continuity Plan, one that will have an effective decision on the components of the IT infrastructure required to support the business.

A business continuity plan is highly involved, time-consuming and requires continuous updating as the environment changes. A disaster recovery plan is unique to the facility or service and should include the step by step process on how to recovery (Carrillo, 2011). A plan is just a plan unless it is exercised at regular intervals, this exercise is not only a validation of the plan’s procedures, but training for the staff before a disaster is declared (Day & Day, 2006, pg. 12; Pinta, 2011, pg.

Contingency and business resumption planning is necessary for banks to be sure that they can deliver products and services in the event of adverse circumstances. Security issues should be considered when the institution develops its contingency and business resumption plans, sophisticated as those at the primary processing site. High levels of system availability will be a

It's crucial for enterprise to protect data. However, at some point, something in your information technology infrastructure is going to fail - it's inevitable. Downtime - the scourge of the information technology (IT) professional. Your users don't care why they can't access their data, they just want it fixed...and now! To avoid having an end-user riot on your hands, Your main goal is to restore normal business operation as soon as possible.

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.

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.

There is a perception in the UK that Small – Medium Enterprises (SMEs) generally don’t implement Business Continuity Management (BCM). BCM is becoming more and more standard but its benefits aren’t always clear.