Business Continuity and Resilience Blog

Our continuity and resilience consultants share their insight.

IT Testing

Posted by Mark Robinson on Sep 21, 2023

The quotation “No plan survives first contact with the enemy…” is likely to resonate with any IT executive faced with using their IT DR Plan for the first time.  The chances of any plan instantly fitting the situation are negligible, leaving nowhere to turn.  Instead, rather than consume the golden hour reading and adapting, many choose to discard it in favour of an ad hoc experiential response.   

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Tags: Business Impact Analysis

IT Runbooks

Posted by Mark Robinson on Sep 21, 2023

Imagine you are in the office and a potentially catastrophic IT incident occurs.  Escalation takes place and the team arrives at a predetermined command centre location.  They get briefed, and each key role-assignee is asked to adapt and implement their section of a comprehensive and weighty IT DR Plan.  Each copy must be kept synchronised with others, whilst satisfying the deadlines for services.  

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Tags: Business Impact Analysis

IT Impact Mapping and Analysis

Posted by Mark Robinson on Sep 21, 2023

Impact Analysis plays an important part in IT DR Planning.  It generates essential deadlines, ensuring assets are recovered within tolerable limits in an incident, prioritising and setting the required tempo for safe recovery.  It informs business-as-usual decisions to invest in the resilience of the IT estate, identifying risks and improvement opportunities.  

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Tags: Business Impact Analysis

Approaching Business Continuity Planning post Covid-19

Posted by Mark Robinson on May 01, 2020

The effects of Covid-19 have significantly raised awareness of Business Continuity Planning, not least because many office-based firms have adapted and applied their plans and worked from home.  However, the operational impacts could not have been foreseen by many others, including manufacturers, retailers, restaurants and events companies. Why? Because virtually all their pre-planned fallback positions faced the same extraordinary challenge - lockdown with frozen budgets, stalled production and a broken supply chain.

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Tags: Supply Chain, Business Continuity Management, Risk, Business Impact Analysis, Resilience, ISO 22301, Insurance, Manufacturing, Blueprint, Small Business, Pandemic

Business Survival during Covid-19

Posted by Mark Robinson on Apr 07, 2020

This article talks about our suggested approach of managing the business through pandemic day-to-day. It includes some observations that may help you.

This is our second continuity article about Covid-19. Our first, Pandemic Planning for Business has been viewed and shared by thousands of organisations, with several that we know of adopting some or all the guidance it proposed. Although the situation has developed far beyond what many expected, it’s worth noting that most points we raised have materialised in some form.

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Tags: Business Continuity Management, Risk, Resilience, Insurance, Small Business, Pandemic