All organisations should have business continuity planning (BCP) in place regardless if they have online services or not.
With the pervasive use of information and communications technology within the operations of an organisation and a greater level of inter-dependency among various enterprises, including partners, suppliers, vendors, distributors, logistics and customers, there is an increase in risk due to the cascading factor. Hence, a critical need for business continuity management, say industry experts.
PricewaterhouseCoopers Malaysia's Senior Executive Director, Ong Ai Lin says BCP is not just about having an IT disaster recovery plan, but it also encompasses crisis management which includes communication with customers and other stakeholders and business recovery plans.
"All BCP must recognise their inter-dependencies both internally (among departments) and externally (with suppliers, customers, regulators, etc).
The best way to ensure that (BCP) is available is to regularly test it. Testing can be both modular as well as with an organisation's inter- dependent entities."
According to Ong, in cases where an enterprise delegates its IT functions to third parties, the enterprise must ensure that the service level agreement within the outsourcing contract contain the minimum downtime that is allowed. The enterprise should ensure that the third-party service provider has adequate BCP to achieve the enterprise's recovery objectives in a disaster, she says.
This article first appeared in and was extracted from Computimes (The New Straits Times), on 18 July 2005.
