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Business Continuity
Planning is critical to the survival of an entity.
As business
operations continue to globalize by outsourcing many of their business
operational infrastructures and processes and the threat of terrorism both
at home and abroad has expanded, Business Continuity Planning has become
even more important.
How thorough and current is your plan?
When was the last time you tested it?
Advantageware offers assistance in the following areas:
We will work with you to
assess the completeness and practicality of your Business Continuity Plan.
We will provide an objective analysis of:
The completeness of your plan.
Mergers, changes in
products, globalization – these have all become the critical factors to many
enterprises. Our first step will
be to make certain that your plan covers all parts of your organization and is
up-to-date as to your goods and services.
The environment of your plan.
Technology has changed
radically and your plan must reflect the new computers, networks, voice
technologies, emphasis upon the Internet, out-sourcing of maintenance –
whatever the environment now is. Our
second step will be to help you inventory your environment and compare what
you now have in place with what was extant when your plan was written.
The priorities.
A critical part of any plan is the way recovery is
scheduled. How quickly various
business functions must be back in operation determines most of your data
backup/recovery and duplicate equipment decisions. The disaster recovery section will be the part of your
continuity plan that is needed first. Our
third step will be to create a cost/decision matrix to allow business heads to
make informed choices about the level of recovery needed.
The details.
The meat of the plan is the
how to prepare for and how to perform in the event of a disaster.
Our fourth step will be a very specific, nitty-gritty review of how
your plan addresses each of the major types of disaster. We will work with you
to determine whether your
backup/recovery scenarios need revision.
We will emphasize the immediate parts of the plan beginning with how a
disaster is “called” and personnel are mobilized.
The verification.
While “God is in the
details” the proof is in the testing. Our
final step will be to help you craft Continuity Plan testing and execute your
first recovery test. We will then
help you decide upon the frequency of future testing and the maintenance of
your plan.
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Advantageware will assist you
in performing the following necessary steps for creating a new Business
Continuity Plan: Below are the
steps we envision:
A complete inventory of your processes and systems.
This will go from desktop to
back-office processing. Personal
computers, servers, mid-size computers, and mainframes will all be included.
How data flows through your network and where it is presented to
business people is a key ingredient. We
will help you focus upon the desktop especially since this is where we have
encountered the largest number of issues with undocumented systems and data
manipulation.
A data Inventory.
This will tell you where the
data is and how important it is That
determines what should be done in
terms of frequency of back-ups, needs for off-site storage, and how quickly a
restoration must take place. We
will work with whatever data tools you have installed or use our own set to do
this efficiently.
A current list of vendors with up-to-date contact information.
We often find is that the
people you negotiated a contract with are long gone when you need to ask some
critical questions. And the midst
of a serious problem is a bad time to be dealing with out-of-date phone
numbers. We will help you develop
a vendor contact system that is available when needed and easily updated.
A business user interview guide.
We will help you create a program designed to get
priorities and contacts from the key business people. We will develop a cost/decision matrix to allow business
heads to make informed choices about the level of recovery needed.
If you want us to, we will conduct or help you conduct these
interviews.
Once the information has been gathered we will
work with you to create the plan using a template we will customize for you.
The plan will be in the format you find easiest to maintain.
We can suggest alternatives if you want us to.
A disaster recovery scenario.
We
will help you create a detailed plan of how your business will react if a
disaster occurs.
This will include a list of possible disasters, the way to mobilize
people depending upon when the disaster is “called”, and the detailed
steps to perform.
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Advantageware offers a
continuity plan maintenance service. We
can create a plan for you and periodically update it. We can also take an existing plan and, following an
assessment of how current it is, agree to a maintenance schedule with you.
We can provide off-site storage of that plan at our New York office with
an agreed-upon retrieval time frame.
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- Advantageware uses VISIO when performing business process and data analysis.
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