Service Continuity Management

How can you protect your organization from disaster and minimize its impact on the day to day services? The simple answer is Service Continuity Management - also known as DCP (Disaster Contingency Planning), DRP (Disaster Recovery Planning) or just plain Disaster Recovery (DR) – yes, the list is endless. What is Service Continuity Management? And why is it so important to an organization? Service Continuity Management provides a framework for developing infrastructure plan to protect your organization from a disaster. Service Continuity Management ensures that your organization have an alternative option ready to ensure business continuity in the event of a significant outage or disruption. Service Continuity Management frameworks vary by region because different areas have different risks. Hence plans to tackle these outages or minimize the impact have to be different. All these plans are highly customized to meet business continuity requirements.

To build a robust IT continuity plan the IT team needs to take into account multiple factors that could impact the business. These could relate to IT security, environmental hazards or even a volatile political situation.

It goes without saying that implementing an IT Continuity plan would have a cost involved. For example, for critical IT operations a skeletal staff may have to be maintenance at an alternate location. Also IT services need to be provided to that staff as well. Hence implementation of the IT Continuity plan needs to be well thought of. On the face of it, looks like a dead investment however this needs to be evaluated in comparison with the losses the business would suffer in case the alternative is not available. The process of having a good IT continuity plan is not simple. It begins with identifying critical processes and what is the level of risks these are exposed to. The next step is to have an acceptable level of risk and then implement controls / mitigation steps to be taken in case of disaster.

One more very critical yet neglected aspect of having a good business continuity plan is the training of the personnel. It is very important for each and every person associated with the continuity plan to be very clear of the role that he or she has to play. Periodic training needs to be conducted to all the people to ensure that they are clear about the action that needs to be taken when the disaster occurs. This would also include steps to be carried out (backups, evacuation etc), personnel to be informed etc. It is also a good practice to invoke and test the SR or business continuity plan at least once a year to ensure that it is up and running.

Manage IT’s Service Continuity Management covers all the processes required to make sure that IT services can recover and continue even after a serious incident occurs.

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About Author:

Dimpy Thurakhia is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at dimpy.t@spluspl.com