With the kick-off of Soccer World Cup (SWC) only days away, business leaders have little time to ensure their company's business continuity management plans and recovery sites are geared to handle any potential World Cup emergencies. The good news is there is still time to fine-tune your existing business continuity management policies to ensure your organisation is ready to face any business disasters.
For those wanting to do a last check that their business continuity management preparations are sufficient to handle emergencies during the SWC, Louise Theunissen, GM of consulting services at ContinuitySA, offers the following tips.
Recovery site risk assessment: Organisations should assess whether their recovery site provider has conducted a 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup risk assessment and impact analysis. This will ensure the provider has assessed, reduced, transferred and/or mitigated all possible risks and implemented the appropriate strategies.
Recovery site business continuity plans: It is essential that organisations ensure their recovery site has an up-to-date business continuity plan in place. The SWC poses additional risks that also apply to recovery site providers. In the event of a disaster, organisations should be sure that their recovery site provider will be able to continue to deliver this essential service.
Alternative access: Should the nominated recovery site be unavailable, for example, due to access denial, an alternative should be chosen and established in advance. If the organisation currently uses one of its own sites, it is worth considering outsourcing a second, alternative site for the duration of the SWC.
Testing policies: It is critical that organisations test their business continuity management processes well in advance of the SWC to ensure their resilience is up to standard and able to protect the business from the relevant risks.
Pandemic management strategies: Those responsible for corporate pandemic strategies must ensure they are incorporated into the strategies of their recovery site. As risk levels are raised during June and July 2010, the chances are higher that the recovery site will be used, but if a virus spreads in the recovery site, it would have a substantial impact on the ability of the business to operate.
Invocation procedures implemented: As part of an organisation's preparation for the World Cup, it is imperative that its business continuity plans include updated invocation procedures relevant to this high-risk time for corporate South Africa. Should an incident occur, the relevant business units, incident management teams and key individuals, will be prepared to deal with it, resulting in minimal impact on revenue and reputation.
Change control established: It would also be wise to implement a freeze period on changes to business continuity management processes for June and July 2010. Once the systems and processes in place are operating in a satisfactory manner, risks would be substantially increased by implementing changes during this potentially unstable time.
Mass invocations: Part of the critical planning for the SWC period is to ensure the organisation has sufficient infrastructure capacity to cope successfully with mass invocations in a worst-case scenario. This applies to the primary, secondary and tertiary recovery sites. Attention should be paid to each organisation's recovery capacity and speed. This is often a stumbling block as recovery from backups can be particularly slow when capacity is limited.
IT infrastructure resilience: Protecting your organisation's IT and telecoms infrastructure is crucial. The strain on communications resources, both voice and data during the World Cup, may or may not overwhelm the communications mechanisms vital to business. Business continuity planning must take this into account and make provision for redundancy and resilience.
Special equipment health check: It is also non-negotiable that a health check on special equipment is carried out well in advance of the SWC. This will allow those responsible to implement any necessary maintenance and repairs. Stock of critical spares should be sourced and SLAs with suppliers firmed up. Alternate suppliers should also be considered.
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