Can you afford for your systems to take a holiday too?

01 December 2004

Will your organisation make the six o'clock news for all the wrong reasons this summer?

How confident are you that, while your company continues its business with a skeleton staff during the holidays, you have the plans and infrastructure in place to maintain operations should a disaster or major incident occur?

A recently released study of disaster preparedness found that 56% of the Australian companies surveyed said they had no idea how long it would take to achieve normal or even skeletal operations, in the event of a natural disaster such as a fire or storm completely destroying the company’s primary data centre.

The Disaster Recovery Research Report 2004 conducted by UK-based Dynamic Markets Ltd, surveyed 1,259 IT professionals around the world, including 50 from Australia’s largest organisations.

Business continuity - a moving target

Organisations that do have business continuity plans in place face an ongoing challenge in maintaining the relevance of these plans. Recovery times and critical loads vary as new business processes are added, so recovery capabilities need to be reviewed at least annually.

Plans also have to be tested. In the study mentioned above, 51% of Australian respondents said they had implemented their disaster recovery (DR) plans either in part or in full over the past 12 months, yet 81% admitted there were “barriers” to testing their current DR plans.  

Some geared-up companies take their preparation for a disaster seriously by undertaking scenario planning, where partial or full scale implementation of the plan is undertaken.

How CITEC can help

CITEC’s Director Professional Services, Patricia Hopkins, said CITEC could assist organisations to achieve best practice in business continuity.

“We have a solid understanding of the business continuity requirements that are quickly becoming a cornerstone of the regulatory environment, such as the APRA standard and the Queensland Government’s Information Standard 18.

“Our consultants can perform a business impact assessment to identify business risks and classify business processes.

“We can also assist in developing frameworks for implementing business continuity technologies and processes.”

For more information about CITEC’s consulting services, please telephone 1300 366 262 or email info@citec.com.au.

Read more CITEC Confirm feature news