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PatrickPotter1
Archer Employee
Archer Employee

What is Business Continuity & IT Disaster Recovery Planning?

Business continuity (BC) and IT disaster recovery (DR) planning is defined as the development of strategies, plans and actions which provide protection or alternative modes of operation for those activities or business processes which, if they were to be interrupted, might otherwise bring about a seriously damaging or potentially fatal loss to the enterprise.

 

Why is Business Continuity & IT Disaster Recovery Planning important?

In today’s world, 24/7 service delivery requirements are putting greater pressure on business and IT resource availability, making it even more important to have effective recovery plans. Interruptions ranging from isolated infrastructure failures to natural disasters have the potential to cause serious harm to the organization’s finances and reputation. Unfortunately, recovery efforts are often chaotic, ad hoc and uncoordinated due to little or non-existent planning efforts and business recovery and IT disaster recovery teams working in silos.

Your continuity and recovery teams live in a world of regulatory saturation, with dozens of regulations, methodologies, maturity models, guidelines and laws. These authoritative sources affect how you implement and manage your business continuity programs. The demands from regulators for strengthened programs have increased, while the number and type of catastrophic man-made and natural disasters are on the rise, resulting in regulatory fines and penalties due to the inability to comply during a disruption.

 

Another challenge affecting the ability of companies to recover after a disruption are recovery plans kept in multiple, inadequate tools that don’t allow management visibility to quickly answer questions, like which business processes or IT infrastructure are missing recovery plans or which plans have not been tested. Further, many IT disaster recovery teams are working with an understanding of what is critical or most important to recover that is different than that of business continuity teams. This results in an inability to align on and recover critical business and supporting IT infrastructure to deliver products and services according to recovery objectives.

 

RSA Archer Business Continuity & IT Disaster Recovery Planning

The RSA Archer Business Continuity & IT Disaster Recovery Planning use case addresses the problems outlined above through key features that include:

  • Centralized location, templates, workflow, review and approval processes for developing standardized business continuity and IT disaster recovery plans that are built around best practices and industry standards
  • Project management capabilities to help drive the entire lifecycle of continuity planning, from plan development, to testing, to continuous improvement
  • Dashboards and reports that provide visibility into the current state of the organization’s plans status, review dates, test results and remediation status
  • Workflows and reporting that enables coordination between business continuity, IT DR, and crisis teams

With RSA Archer Business Continuity & IT Disaster Recovery Planning, you will be able to:

  • Improve your response to disruptions, which can reduce the impact on revenue, brand and customer loyalty and availability of products and services for customers, employees and third parties
  • Implement a consistent and coordinated planning process and methodology for business and IT supported through one central tool
  • Increase trust by senior management, the board, regulators and employees with higher-quality, tested recovery plans
  • Ensure plans are aligned with the organization’s priorities and include the most critical processes and company assets
  • Coordinate information, priorities and objectives among business continuity, IT disaster recovery and crisis teams, and responders, enabling better focus on the right priorities in the event of a disaster

 

RSA Archer Business Continuity & IT Disaster Recovery Planning is one element of Integrated Risk Management. This use case provides a coordinated, consistent and automated approach to business continuity and IT disaster recovery planning and execution, allowing you to respond swiftly in crisis situations to protect your ongoing operations. As your company drives business growth with new initiatives, technology adoption or market expansion, your program must evolve and manage risk with more agility and integration than before.  Managing recovery planning is one ingredient to building resiliency across the organization and reducing risk.

 

RSA Archer can help your organization manage multiple dimensions of risk on one configurable, integrated software platform. With RSA Archer solutions, organizations can efficiently implement risk management processes using industry standards and best practices and significantly improve their business risk management maturity.

 

For more information, visit RSA.com or read the Datasheet.