Recent worldwide disaster events, including in our own backyard of Australia with Cyclone Yasi and the Queensland floods has highlighted the requirement for businesses to put in place robust Business Continuity Management and IT Disaster Recovery plans as a key preventative mechanism to ensure the continuance of business operations post a business impacting event. Businesses require a comprehensive Business Continuity management program consisting of risk assessed and tested Crisis Management, Business Continuity and Resource Recovery Plans to provide a level of comfort to management, regulators and shareholders that the business in which they have invested has suitable mechanisms in place to continue business operations when operations become affected and unavailable. Modern businesses rely heavily upon their Information Technology infrastructure and operations during disaster events and as such it is critically important that CIO's and IT Professionals are adept at recovery operations utilising pre approved and tested IT Recovery Plans.
In assisting our clients to develop comprehensive Business Continuity and IT Disaster Recovery systems we propose a risk assessed process by first gaining an understanding of the business through the completion of a Business Impact Assessment in which we seek to understand the "pain" threshold for the organisation due to the unavailability of critical business processes over time. As part of this process Vestinex assists clients to define the critical business process, then map the criticality of the process over time and ultimately to identify those resources within the business upon which those critical processes are reliant. We then assist our clients to develop strategies to recommence critical processes in the absence of these resources until resumption of Business As Usual (BAU) operations.
Secondly, we then assist the organisation to develop Crisis Management Plans to manage the business impacting event and assess the damage to the business operations including human resources. Finally, we assist the organisation to develop comprehensive Business and IT Resource Recovery plans and options to ensure the continued trading of the business through the subsequent months of business recovery.