Business Continuity Management

6. Business Continuity Management: Risk Reduction

The requirements analysis (completed within stage 2 of the business continuity management process) will have identified those issues that need to be addressed through risk reduction rather than recovery. These may include:

• Cross-training for critical or specialist operations
• Changes to business practices to remove or reduce the number of points of failure
• Documentation of critical functions
• Splitting business processes over more than one site
• Installation of UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) and potentially back-up power for computer systems to reduce vulnerability to power failure
• Implementation of a more robust backup strategy and tape management system.
• Providing offsite storage of backup media, either within the organisation or with a third party
• Fault-tolerant and/or high-availability systems for critical applications where even minimal downtime is unacceptable. For example, a banking system
• RAID arrays (Redundant Array of Independent Discs) and disc mirroring for LAN (Local Area Network) servers to guard against data loss and to ensure continued availability of data
• Holding spares to be used in the event of equipment or component failure. For example, having a spare LAN server already configured and available to replace a faulty server within a minimum timescale