Shoring Up a Business Continuity Plan for your Business

Every year the United States is pummeled by unpredictable hurricanes, floods, storms and even man-made disasters that often send companies scrambling to save important data threatened by the event.

 

As technology increases and the ability to store vast amounts of information in even a single location continues to grow, it is more important than ever for businesses to develop or update business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

 

It has become a critical aspect of a company’s business plan.

 

In the event of key infrastructure failures, a natural disaster or other emergency that adversely impacts normal business operations, an effective business continuation/disaster recovery plan can help minimize the effects of events and either maintain or help restore essential operations, according to IQ Services (News - Alert).

 

The Minnesota-based IQ Services is on the cutting edge of the Business Continuation/Disaster Recovery space, focusing on helping companies verify that their plans work as expected through a series of tests designed to evaluate a systems performance.

 

As the industry’s first integrated load test service provider, IQ Services extends a full spectrum of expert quality assurance testing services to the telecommunications industry including: test planning; application feature testing; load and performance testing; and post-cutover availability monitoring.

 

In a recent whitepaper from IQ Services titled, "Business Continuation/Disaster Recovery", IQ Services details the ins and outs of picking an appropriate plan.

 

While most companies have in place some type of Business Continuation/Disaster Recovery plan, it is difficult to know that the plan will work as expected at all times, according to the paper.

 

In that respect, IQ Services empowers companies to deliver the best possible experience to their customers through flexible and responsive managed testing services.

 

And it starts with knowing a plan actually works and if a business solution performs as expected.

 

For example, if a key system fails, a company expecting not to be buried in a wash of technology failure, should know a solid contingency plan is in place. Because if it fails, the system may completely malfunction, drop all current calls, shut down incoming calls,  paralyze contact center or self-service application.

 

This impacts a company in many ways, most noticeably through upset customers and lost revenue.

 

In addition, it is also important to determine how long a system takes to come back online. If a production system is down and the contingency plan does not work as expected, doors are essentially closed for business. Periodically testing your system also ensures changes to your system have not affected your plan.

 

In a real world example, as reported by TMCnet, businesses in Lebanon, Pennsylvania recently lost services after gas company employees accidentally cut landline cables. While a pair of workers accidentally cutting phone, cable and Internet services to a Pittsburgh suburb does not constitute a major disaster, it does highlight the need for businesses to protect themselves against such untimely disruptions.

 

In fact, studies show that 75 percent of business interruptions are related to smaller outage events, rather than a major impact like a hurricane. Regardless of where a company is located (since weather-related disasters vary by location), it’s likely that sooner or later some type of outage will occur that will impact business.

 

Having contingency plans in place is smart and could save a company plenty o.

According to IQ Services, the simplest and most effective way to ensure a contingency plan works is to test it under real load while simulating infrastructure failures or a disaster within the system.

 

IQ Services’ Business Continuation/Disaster Recovery testing process provides real traffic to rigorously exercise a system so users know what happens at every step of the contingency plan.

 

In addition, the IQ Services provides real traffic to a systems voice, Web, fax or e-mail. Once the systems are loaded with real traffic, system elements can be disabled in any fashion in order to exercise the contingency plans and validate recovery procedures.

 

With the Business Continuation/Disaster Recovery testing process, control of the volume of traffic, the pace of the test and the elements of the system that are functioning or temporarily disabled is easily monitored. The end result is a clear and comprehensive look at how the system will react under the test scenarios run.

 

At the end of the test, a complete, detailed report is issued that documents the customer experience and results of the test. These reports include data on what happened during every step of every call. This data verifies a contingency plan’s success and can be used to refine the plan as required to meet performance requirements.