Preparation for Your Business’ IT Services During a Pandemic
Important Emergency and Pandemic Plans for Every Business in Metro Detroit
When our Governor of Michigan implemented the Shelter in Place in April, how prepared was your company? Did your employees just go home and work, or did you experience a dramatic setback trying to get everyone and everything situated? Were you scrambling for resources you could have already had in place if your company had the support of a managed IT services company like Key Technology Solutions?
How would your business answer these questions?
- How prepared were you as a company to close your doors and yet still work remotely?
- How much money did you spend on last-minute IT hardware and software to accommodate?
- Did you implement your Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plans?
- Did you even have a plan in place?
Having a Plan is Crucial in the Case of Covid-19 Pandemic or Other Emergency
IT Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is crucial to every business to continue to operate with little or no disruptions to your business.
Below we provided the first section of an IT Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) as an example of the Plans we put together for our clients.
Sample: IT Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
Part 1 INTRODUCTION
PURPOSE
This Information Technology (IT) Business Continuity Plan establishes procedures to recover the (business name removed) following a disruption. The following objectives have been established for this plan:
Maximize the effectiveness of contingency operations through an established plan that consists of the following phases:
- Notification/Activation phase to detect and assess damage and to activate the plan
- Recovery phase to restore temporary IT operations and recover damage done to the original system
- Reconstitution phase to restore IT system-processing capabilities to normal operations.
Identify the activities, resources, and procedures needed to carry out (business name) System’s processing requirements during prolonged interruptions to normal operations.
Assign responsibilities to designated HNA personnel and provide guidance for recovering (business name) Systems during prolonged periods of interruption to normal operations.
Ensure coordination with other Key Technology Solutions (KTS) staff who will participate in the contingency planning strategies.
Ensure coordination with external points of contact and vendors who will participate in the contingency planning strategies.
More on the IT Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan
The IT Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) includes several segments. Each is developed and documented in a plan explicitly for your company. The plan will outline your business’ physical footprint, as well as a full IT System Description and Architecture. The plan will include Line of Succession and Responsibilities so that in the case of any emergency you and Key Technology Solutions both know who to communicate with and what will happen next.
A section titled Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) will outline several Recovery Goals depending on the circumstances of the emergency, and the extent of recovery. The efforts and estimated time to Return to Normal will also be noted in each Recovery Goal scenario with the end goal of full Return To Operations (RTO).
The situations we encounter may be an outage of 5 minutes to a few hours, to a need for Site Restoration or New Site Restoration which involves reestablishing operations at a new location.
Summary: Be prepared for the situations that life sends our way that are out of our control. You may need to suddenly send all your employees to work remotely at home as in the current coronavirus pandemic. A natural disaster may occur that destroys your property. In short, be prepared with an IT Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan from a trusted, experienced IT services company like Key Technology Solutions.