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Business Continuity Plan

 

Business Continuity (BC) is an organization’s ability to respond to and recover from an event that negatively affects business operations.  The goal is to enable the business to regain use of critical systems and IT infrastructure as soon as possible after a disaster occurs.  A BC plan is created to include all the activities that must be followed in case a disaster strikes.

These disasters are events serious in nature. They can be natural disasters like earthquakes or fires, but they can also be caused by technical failure or by humans carrying out intentional attack. These disasters are significant enough to disrupt or completely stop critical business operations for a period of time. The monetary costs can be significant. The Uptime Institute’s Annual Outage Analysis 2021 report estimated that 40% of outages or service interruptions in businesses cost between $100,000 and $1 million, while about 17% cost more than $1 million. A data breach can be more expensive; the average cost in 2020 was $3.86 million, according to the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute.

Additionally, many businesses are required to create and follow plans for disaster recovery, business continuity and data protection in order to meet compliance regulations. This is particularly important for organizations operating in financial, healthcare, manufacturing and government sectors. Failure to have BC procedures in place can result in legal or regulatory penalties, so understanding how to comply with resiliency standards is important.

BC Service Performance.

Merysol Security can be engaged to either develop a new BC Plan or to test an existing one. The purpose of testing a BC plan is to discover flaws in it so the Customer can resolve them before they impact the ability to restore operations.

If a new Plan is to be developed,  Merysol Security will work closely with the business owner and the IT specialist ( if different from the business owner), to create a practical, cost effective plan.  The proposed new plan will be tested to ensure it actually works.

The Business Continuity  Plan engagement consists of the following steps: 

> It begins with a meeting, typically one-hour long, between the business owner and his/her IT representative (if available); and a Merysol Security Expert. In this meeting the BC Plan process is presented, expected cooperation from the business is discussed, and the deliverable BC Plan is explained along with the expected duration of the engagement.

> Merysol Security proceeds to deliver a BC questionnaire. This tailored questionnaire is intended to covers the business activities and personnel involved in emergency operations to restore business as usual.

> The Customer’s person in charge of the project ( 80% of the time is the business owner), fills out the questionnaire either by himself/herself, or with help from Merysol Security. When completed, it is submitted to Merysol Security. Merysol Security analyses the information and prepares the deliverable BC Plan. The Plan is provided to the Customer in electronic form (pdf).

> A meeting is scheduled to discuss the Plan findings and recommendations. Next steps, if any, are discussed

The duration of this engagement is highly dependent on the complexity of the operation and the time it takes the Customer to fill the questionnaire. It usually takes two (2) weeks.

Nowadays it is common for small businesses to engage a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to be their IT expert rather than hire the IT expert in-house. The MSP should be very familiar with the Customer’s BC Plan so they can be effective during an attack requiring to exercise it.

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If you are interested in Merysol Security to contact  you about delivering a Business Continuity  engagement, please fill the details in the following form.  We will contact you very soon.

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