Business Continuity

These include the activities which ensure that critical business functions will be available to end users despite serious incidents or disasters that might otherwise have interrupted them, or will be recovered to an operational state within a reasonably short period. Hence, adequate disaster recovery infrastructure shall be maintained by the organization for ensuring recovery and business continuity in case of any disaster scenario.

Critical components of business continuity

• Resilience – Functions and the supporting infrastructure are designed and engineered in such a way that they are materially unaffected by disruptions like by using spare capacity
• Recovery – Arrangements made to recover or restore critical and less critical business functions which may fail for some reason.
• Contingency – The project establishes a generalized capability and readiness to cope effectively with whatever major incidents and disasters occur, including those that were not, and perhaps could not, have been foreseen. Contingency preparations constitute a last-resort response if resilience and recovery arrangements should prove inadequate in practice.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is about identifying those parts of that can’t be lost and will stop the whole E-Government project usage by end user. To implement BCM following is needed to be answered

• What are key products and services?
• What are the critical activities and resources required to deliver these?
• What are the risks to these critical activities?
• How to maintain these critical activities in the event of an incident (loss of access to premises, loss of utilities etc)

Effective BCM capability is established and maintained by three steps as

• Assigning responsibilities – It is essential that BCM has the full support of management and this should be obtained from the outset. Without this support, it will be virtually impossible to instill a sense of value and ownership among the rest of the workforce. It is also important that an individual or team within your organisation is responsible for managing and co-ordinating the BCM capability. For
• Establishing and implementing BCM – One of the early tasks should be to agree the BCM policy. This would normally be the responsibility of the management board representative, working with others as appropriate, and should set out the scope, aims and objectives of BCM and the activities required to deliver these.
• Ongoing management – There are a number of activities that should be undertaken on an ongoing basis to ensure that BCM continues to be relevant and be updated with any change.