BCP & Disaster Recovery
Integra-IT can assist you in the analysis, review, design, creation, implementation, testing and on-going support of your Business Continuity Plan (BCP)/Disaster Recovery (DR) requirements. We can assess your organisation's exposure to both external and internal risks and offer the best solutions for a recovery process in the event of a need to recover valuable data and/or relocate to a recovery site.

What is BCP?

A BCP enables an organisation to continue operations if their normal place of business is affected by events such as a storm, fire or as a result of crime. The plan would give clear instructions on how the operations would recover the information it needs to continue and/or to move operations to an alternative location. The plan takes into account the risks the company faces with a view to ensuring that key recovery steps are put in place and can be performed during and after a disruption to return the organisation to normal operations as soon as possible.

What do you need to think about?

To be able to create a comprehensive BCP you will need to think about the following;

Communication - to Staff, Clients, Negotiators, Vendors etc.
People - How will you notify, evacuate, transport and care for employees? 

Property - What will you need to keep operating, what equipment will you need, where will you source it from?
Systems - Which areas of your computing and telecommunications infrastructure must be duplicated immediately? How quickly, minute, hour, day? 
Data - What data is critical for BAU. How will you recover critical data? (where will you load it?) You may have backed up your data but should a disaster happen, what do you do with it, where will you load if a fire destroyed your office?

What is your cost of Downtime?

We understand that implementing a BCP can seem alarmingly expensive, but have you considered what your downtime would cost your business, per hour, day, 2 days etc? The fact is, downtime costs accelerate as time passes and work volumes quickly overwhelm manual processes.

Productivity

Number of employees impacted X hours out X burdened hourly rate.

Revenue

Direct loss, Compensation payouts, lost future revenues, billing losses and investment losses.

Damaged Reputation

Customers, Suppliers, Financial Markets, Banks, Business Partners, Investors, Shareholders etc.

Financial Performance

Revenue recognition, cash flow, lost discounts, payment gaurantees, credit rating, stock prices etc.

Other Expenses

Temporary employees, equipment rental, overtime costs, extra shipping and travel expenses.

External Links

SFC - Effective BCP
HKMA - Business Continuity Planning Guideline

HKMA - Recovery Planning Guidelines

Please refer to our 'Case Studies' below to undertand the common myths and attitude surrounding Back-Up, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning and how they address different issues you will neeed to think about.


 

 


Case Studies

Data Backup

Data Backup

Many companies often thinking by backing up their data every night, that this is their disaster recover plan covered. Most back ups happen once a day, usually at night so your RPO (Recovery Point Objective) would be 23 hours. For those organisations that require protection of Mission Critical information and applications, a 23 hour data loss is not acceptable. Additionally, backup software can also fail and so can the person responsible for such back ups. A case springs to mind of an organisation where the office manager took home the back tapes each evening in her handbag. Stopping off to meet friends, the bag was subjected to a freak accident involving a large amount of liquid decending into thebag and rendering the tapes usless. The office burnt down over night.

Lets say you lose your entire office to fire or other disaster, what next? Ok, so you have your data back-up, which backs up offsite at midnight every day. It's now 8am so you are already 8 hours away from your last update. What processes, people, equipment do you need to bring back that backed up data. Back up data from tapes can take days rather than hours, disks a little quicker.

Backing up without little thought to recovery is just as bad as not backing up at all.



Scenario 2 - Disaster Recovery

Scenario 2 - Disaster Recovery

Scenario 3 - Business Continuity Planning

Scenario 3 - Business Continuity Planning