Chartered surveying company
The Client
Our client is a chartered surveying company offering a broad range of professional measurement services to both public and private sectors, including government, transport, film and retail industries.
Increasingly the client’s customers have been asking for evidence of effective business continuity (BC) and IT disaster recovery (DR) planning being in place to ensure they can continue to access data and meet urgent timescales.
The Challenge
As a technology driven business the client recognised internally the need to provide ready availability of IT technology and data to customers and to prove this by aligning to best practice. In addition, a move to a new build premises is proposed and it is recognised that BC and DR should be factored into the move to minimise risk.
The client had identified that aligning to ISO 27031, the international standard for ICT readiness for business continuity (IRBC), was logical for the first phase of their project as it focuses on the DR element, rather than full BC which would be implemented in subsequent phases. The client already adheres to a number of standards and policies as they understand the benefits of aligning with best practice.
Work had already been done to develop documents to support technical recovery solutions and identify strategy solutions, however the challenge for the client was to avoid becoming caught up in minutiae resulting in over-spend in both budget and time. The client recognised the value of bringing in Teed as independent consultants whose specialist experience and knowledge could assist in bringing their project to fruition in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner.
The Solution
Teed’s DR specialist, David Teed, reviewed existing technical recovery documentation to understand the client’s current level of preparedness in terms of recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for specific services for a range of scenarios.
David’s experience from similar projects allowed him to help the client take a step back and take a considered approach to identifying where potential improvements to recovery strategies, risk controls and DR planning could be made to allow business expectations and best practice to be satisfied. For example, instead of focusing on developing recovery strategies for a number of different scenarios resulting in complex and overly detailed processes, the most effective method is to focus on the worst case scenario which in turn ensures that lesser events are taken into account.
Following the review, David produced a DR Recommendations Report for the client summarising their current position and improvements required to meet business expectations and best practice. For example:
- Taking advantage of replication of services to an existing secondary location
enabling them to be brought up quickly in the event of a disruption - Setting up transferable remote access capability with minimum requirements
for emergency office location - Validating the recovery strategies that had been implemented during
the project via a DR test
The Result
The client recognised the value that Teed’s specialist input and experience brought to the project resulting in a well thought out and tested DR planning programme, achieved on budget and on time.
The client now has a solid foundation upon which to build in further resilience by expanding the focus to consider other risks to the business. In satisfying the requirements of ISO 27031, the client has an additional selling point when seeking future business opportunities as it can now show that its services would always be available to customers.