Business Continuity Planning & Disaster Recovery

With today's prevalence of natural and man-made disasters, an organization's future – often its survival – can depend on the effectiveness of its plans to address business disruptions. Plexent has helped numerous customers prepare detailed Business Continuity Plans and Disaster Recovery Plans tailored to their unique needs, threats and business drivers – arming them, so they're ready for anything.

Our Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning Approach

Plexent believes building effective plans begins with a clear understanding of what impacts the business, and since every business is unique, we begin our multi-phased approach with a Business Impact Assessment (BIA), which is fundamental to aligning business and technology recovery plans with critical business functions.

Key BCP/DR Components

  • Business Impact Analysis
  • Risk Analysis
  • Business Resumption Plan
  • Testing, Implementation and Maintenance

Plexent works with customers to understand the financial and organizational impacts of disruptions and helps to

  • Organize and categorize past disruptions
  • Identify most likely future disruptions
  • Map probabilities of future disruptions to business impact
  • Identify potential costs of future disruptions
  • Identify strategies to reduce exposure to disruptions and associated impact costs

We then review the organization's business drivers and goals, and determine the strategic functions needed for the company's future, including the people, processes and technology associated with each function.

Benefits to Plexent's BCP/DR Approach

The BIA serves as the blueprint for BCP/DR efforts and helps planning teams ensure recovery plans for critical functions are developed, tested and improved over time.

Be Armed and Ready

  • Reduce Vulnerability
  • Minimize Downtime
  • Maintain Productivity
  • Increase Customer Satisfaction
  • Sustain Profitability

Plexent works with customers to review critical functions and document detailed people, process and technology elements, and our consultants develop detailed recovery and testing plans that help organization to

  • Understand recovery plan options
  • Identify people, process and technology recovery requirements
  • Identify dependencies and interrelationships among functions and between systems
  • Build effective recovery plans
  • Identify and develop meaningful testing plans
  • Connect plans to organizational change practices for ongoing and continuous updates
  • Establish an effective continuous improvement process for business continuity plans

The most critical success factor in a business' ability to recover from a major disruption is the existence of a well-thought and tested recovery plan so detailed the organization can focus on the unique elements that could not be anticipated during plan development – improving recovery chances dramatically.

The Phases of Plexent's BCP/DR Approach

Here's a quick roadmap highlighting phases of the approach Plexent leverages to help so many businesses stay in business.

Phase 1 – Pre-planning Activities

Plexent gains an understanding of the existing and projected computing environment to refine the project scope, develop a schedule and identify issues impacting the creation of an executable BCP.

Phase 2 – Business Impact Analysis

This phase focuses on the identification of vital business functions (VBFs) and the systems necessary to support them. The result is a sequenced and prioritized list of critical functions with a timeline for their restoration.

Phase 3 – Risk Assessment

This phase takes the output of the qualitative analysis from Phase II and continues with quantitative analysis. Using techniques such as Decision Analysis and Expected Monetary Value, Plexent helps to estimate the probability and impact of adverse events.

Phase 4 – Strategy Definition

Armed with the knowledge of what is needed to operate, the likelihood of losing it, and how much it will cost if lost, recovery strategies can now be explored. It is important to consider alternatives for short, intermediate and long-term outages.

Phase 5 – Business Continuity Plan Development

Here, recovery standards are developed, selected strategies are committed to paper, roles and responsibilities are outlined, and resources are identified.

Phase 6 – Business Continuity Plan Testing Strategy

Test objectives based on the VBFs are developed along with a schedule for full and limited exercises to evaluate the viability of strategies within the BCP.

Phase 7 – Business Resumption Planning

The primary objective of this phase is to develop strategies to reestablish normal business operations following the execution of the BCP.

Phase 8 – Initial Business Continuity Plan Testing and Implementation

Once the BCP and supporting annexes are complete, it is time for testing and implementation. This is often an iterative process as details unforeseen during initial strategy development do not surface until the plan is invoked.

Phase 9 – Ongoing Business Continuity Plan Maintenance

The BCP is a living document that requires maintenance to remain relevant. It must reflect changes to the business plan and the IT services that support it.

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