Building an effective business continuity plan

http://www.citrix.com/businesscontinuity Take a look into the Citrix Disaster Recovery and Business and Continuity plan – learn how virtualization technology can help ensure the availability and secure accessibility of information resources to workers globally.

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Transcript : Establishing, implementing, and maintaining an effective disaster recovery and business continuity plan should always be a high priority item for organizations worldwide. To understand why, consider the frequency and types of events that have occurred in recent years. From natural disasters and pandemics to a wide range of less severe, yet still significant disturbances, these events have the potential to substantially impact a company’s bottom line. To aid companies in formulating their own plans, let’s take a look at the Citrix Business Continuity Plan and how virtualization technology can help ensure the availability and secure accessibility of information resources to workers globally. The goal of the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan at Citrix is to maintain business critical functions and services before, during, and after a wide range of events. This is important to limit the magnitude of financial loss and control the operational impact, as well as ensure rapid recovery of company operations to protect employees, customers, shareholders, and the company reputation. The Citrix Business Continuity Plan combines both preventive and recovery measures. It is updated regularly, tested systematically, and communicated frequently to ensure effectiveness in mitigating business disruption. Today, many organizations are concerned with keeping their IT infrastructure running smoothly and assuring users have continuous access to essential resources, even in the face of disruption. Fluid business operations, avoiding lost revenue, meeting service level agreements, and avoiding customer defections, as well as maximizing worker productivity are key objectives to be met in a cost-effective manner and without introducing new risks in data protection or meeting compliance and regulatory requirements. From an IT perspective, a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity strategy should guard against network, device, data center, and site level outages, and include plans for maintaining workforce continuity. As a result, sustaining business operations and keeping them as close as possible to normal, should be treated as a two-part problem: 1). Ensuring that information resources, data applications, and desktops are available, and 2). Ensuring that users can, in fact, access them, ideally in a secure manner. Although infrequent, major disasters that disable or destroy an entire data center, such as an earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami, must be planned for due to the magnitude of the damage they can cause. Events that are far less catastrophic, such as a flu outbreak, transit strike, or even a power outage, are quite common and can have a big impact on business operations, as well. At Citrix, we use a scenario-based planning approach that takes into account potential unexpected disasters such as fire, flood, earthquake, flu or pandemic outbreak that may occur. And due to our headquarter’s location in south Florida, hurricanes are a reality that we prepare for. Unlike other disasters, we usually have about one week lead time to plan for a hurricane, in which we prepare our facilities, set the office closure schedule, and move a core IT team to an alternative site, as needed. We do plan for additional scenarios that may exist in other regions, as appropriate. The Citrix Business Continuity Plan is always based on the worst case scenario, so we are prepared to face the worst. Anything less severe is simply a subset of the plan. The Citrix Business Continuity Team comprises a core Emergency Management Team that sets the overall direction for disaster recovery and business continuity. This team includes the Director of Business Continuity and vice presidents of IT, human resources, and finance. Working with the Emergency Management Team is the Communications Team, the Campus Response Team, and the Business Readiness Team. We also have key business unit contacts for all the business units. The Communications Team is responsible for putting together communications to our employees, customers, partners, and the media, as required. The Campus Response Team does the site preparation, the security, damage assessment, and cleanup. This team also includes an IT team that helps make the decisions about network routing or fail-over to the alternative site. The Business Readiness Team is the liaison between our core Emergency Management Team and our business unit team leads. This keeps the core team small so that we can quickly make decisions regarding the campus or region, while incorporating business unit input. This team structure is replicated across all our regions and sites to ensure global business continuity. Besides workforce disruption, organizations must consider the potential for lost revenue, negative impact on cash flow, and other foreseen business impact. Citrix conducts a Business Impact Analysis that ranks core activities by financial or non-financial impact and maps inter-dependencies between activities and systems. The analysis also defines recovery time and objectives, and defines process, people, equipment, and IT systems needed to meet continuity objectives. At Citrix, the Business Continuity Plan documents critical processes and procedures to recover business functions in the event of interruption. These plans are region and business unit specific and updated annually. The IT Disaster Recovery Team tests all critical applications quarterly for business continuity preparedness. A truly effective solution for disaster recovery and business continuity must account not just for disruptions to your application infrastructure, but also for disruptions to the people who use the infrastructure. In other words, workforce continuity matters, too. This means that a complete solution must support secure remote access, as well as human factors beyond IT recovery. It needs to do so for a population of users that normally operates locally. You can’t count on these users having corporate-issued laptops, complete with a pre-configured remote access capability and appropriate security software. It needs to do so regardless of where the users are located and what sort of network connectivity they have. And it needs to provide access to all types of applications: web based, Windows, and client server. Citrix provides a complete set of virtualization technologies to help improve the resilience and usefulness of an organization’s information infrastructure, ensuring not just that critical resources remain available, but they are always accessible to all users, in any location, with any device. We use Citrix Delivery Center for business continuity as well as day-to-day operations. By implementing Citrix virtualization solutions, organizations reduce the risks due to both IT service outages and workforce continuity disruptions. With Citrix, organizations gain the ability to rapidly provision secure access to the corporate data and applications that disrupted workers need to do their jobs wherever they may be located, on whatever device they may have with them. Critical workloads can automatically be migrated from overloaded or failed servers and damaged data centers to available hardware in a designated resource pool, or in an alternate facility clear across the continent. Application sessions can automatically be routed around failed devices or to an entirely different data center, as the situation dictates. Robust security and granular access controls can be implemented for all access sessions. And the full set of Citrix application delivery functionality can itself be migrated to an alternate facility, if necessary. Citrix online services allow organizations to support end users and collaborate effectively during a disruption. It connects employees with simple web conferencing and allows IT staff to remotely support any end user. In use day-to-day, these solutions substantially enhance the availability of an organization’s information infrastructure, while also enabling users to securely access desktops, applications, and data from anywhere, with any device. Citrix improves infrastructure scalability and performance, reduces complexity and costs across business and IT, and increases adaptability and business agility while improving compliance and security.