Johannesburg, 18 Jul 2001
Commerce Centre, a subsidiary of Datacentrix Holdings, has completed the roll-out of a comprehensive business continuity strategy to ensure that its most critical processes and systems will continue to operate in the event of a manmade or natural disaster.
Chris Havenga, projects director at Commerce Centre, says the e-business service company has disaster recovery procedures and equipment in place, but has now drawn up a set of formal business continuity policies and tightened up on areas where it was vulnerable in the past.
"We examined what we would require to keep our critical business processes running in the event of a disaster, not only what would keep our core IT systems operational. A disaster can be defined very broadly as any event that disrupts the normal running of the business," says Havenga.
In the first phase of the business continuity project, the impact analysis, company management examined the possible ramifications of every conceivable disaster on its business functions and infrastructure. These threats range from electrical outages, fires and hacking attempts through to natural events such as floods and lightening.
"We looked at the risks to our critical processes as well as the staff and infrastructure required to keep those functions operative. We also looked at the dependencies between the various processes involved in our business, examined how long the company could survive if certain functions went down, and weighed up the possibility of each disaster happening," Havenga says.
In the next phase, Commerce Centre looked at ways of minimising risks so that many disasters can be prevented from happening or from having a large impact on the company.
In addition, the company drew up a set of contingency plans and recovery procedures, encompassing factors such as where the process normally takes place; who should be involved in disaster recovery; how long it will take to get each business function up once recovery procedures are initiated; and how long the backup equipment and staff can keep the business processes running.
Havenga says that applying this rigorous methodology to the business gave Commerce Centre an insight into areas where its disaster recovery procedures could be improved. For example, the company has tightened up on data security and increased the frequency of backups to lessen the potential impact of a disaster hitting its data centre.
Drawing up a business continuity strategy is a balancing act between risk and cost, says Havenga. He points out that some organisations in the US are so heavily dependent on IT and Internet-related infrastructure and services that they invest a substantial percentage of their IT budgets into business continuity services.
As a provider of Internet-related services to its customers, Commerce Centre`s business depends on the availability of its IT infrastructure. For that reason, the company has a backup site that is identical to its main data centre so that it can continue operating in the event of a disaster that puts the primary site out of action. An investment of that nature could be overkill for many businesses.
"Our business provides mission-critical services such as business-to-business (B2B) integration and online trading to other companies. As such, it is critical that we are able to recover from a disaster in minutes rather than hours since the impact on our business and on our customers could be catastrophic.
"However, we have taken a pragmatic approach to business continuity that draws on sound risk management principles. This ensures that we can bring the most critical business processes up in the shortest amount of time in the event of any probable disaster," Havenga says.
In the world of e-business where companies are increasingly dependent on electronic links with a web of trading partners and service providers, it is also important to draw up tight service level agreements with applications service providers, Internet service providers, and telecoms firms, says Havenga. Where possible, alternative sources of Internet services or electricity should be accessible in the event that disaster strikes at one of the company`s service providers.
Havenga stresses that a successful business continuity programme needs to be driven from the very top of the organisation, with buy-in from staff at all levels.
Once the business continuity policies and processes are in place, the organisation cannot afford to become complacent, says Havenga. Regular checks on the health of back-up procedures and equipment needed to bring the company up after a disaster should become a part of the organisational culture. The business recovery procedures should be tested and rehearsed to ensure that they are practical and do actually work.
Share