Business Continuity Management means ensuring the continuity or uninterrupted provision of operations and services. Business Continuity Management is an on-going process with several different but complementary elements. Planning for business continuity is a comprehensive process that includes disaster recovery, business recovery, business resumption, and contingency planning.

While companies agree that that business continuity and disaster recovery planning are vital activities, most small and medium business are far from ready. The creation and maintenance of a sound business continuity and disaster recovery plan, is a complex undertaking, involving a series of steps. From business impact and risk analysis, creating a recovery plan, training, to implementation—everything involves a level of complexity that makes companies either sidestep the issue or end up with a faulty or even unworkable plan.

Pugmarks can help your business create a disaster recovery and business continuity plan, test it, as well as maintain it. In addition, Pugmarks also takes steps for disaster avoidance which can further minimize the risk and provide prevention from factors that can be controlled.

Given the number of blackouts, hurricanes and other disasters that have come our way over the past few years, it is time to wisely re-examine your disaster recovery strategies. Pugmarks can help you plan, execute and manage the best practice for your disaster prevention and recovery strategy using established and tested methods.

Pugmarks Business Continuity Management

In order to ensure business involvement in the development and maintenance of the business continuity plan, Pugmarks breaks down separated business continuity planning and disaster recovery into two initiatives each with its own governance and goals. For disaster recovery, the goal is technical recovery, and the plan is created and managed by developers and engineers. Business continuity’s goal is business process stability, and that plan is developed—in partnership with IT by business unit representatives.

Right resource allocation Does your organization need to dedicate a department within IT to manage business continuity planning and disaster recovery? Pugmarks can help working with the management and IT staff in formulating what is the appropriate level of disaster preparedness and resources your business needs. Make sure the plan can stand alone When disaster strikes, the staff who wrote the recovery plan may not be available to execute it. One has to make sure that the disaster recovery plan will work with or without the people who developed it. Pugmarks makes sure that the recovery procedures can be executed by individual business units.
Priority setting Pugmarks can help you modularize business processes so that in the event of a disaster, the recovery of most financially critical or compliance-wise important process can be done first. The same goes for an offsite facility during a disaster. Pugmarks can help you determine the right people to involve as well as the right services to recover.
Align disaster recovery with application development The IT team must incorporate disaster recovery into its application development processes. But often, the solution delivery deadlines and urgent bug-fixing demands put disaster preparedness on the back-burner. Pugmarks can help you develop an isolated test environment that enables full-time access and continuous testing of all systems and applications, Pugmarks can help you create and maintain a business-continuity database that can include a report on application-testing status. This way, managers know when a system was last tested and whether it demands attention to assure its performance in recovery.
Real environment testing Regularly reviewing your plan on paper is important, but it is not enough. In addition to tabletop tests, Pugmarks can help you go through mock disasters on his crisis management team. These drills are done with actual staff and board members, who must set up a replica data center so that it is operational within a few hours.
Try (and test) before you buy When your IT staff gets completely sold on a new technology for creating systems images Pugmarks can help you evaluate it and try for your environment and application before you buy an real state of the art solution. This way, an organization can save money and embarrassment which some half baked solution may cost. Hold postmortems and adjust What you do with the results of the test is a critical part of disaster recovery planning. Pugmarks helps you create an action-item checklist out of your review of what worked well and what didn't. It is very important to document what went wrong and use that report to outline your expectations for the next test.