Every business plan for finances, expansion strategies, and well-being of employees as these are considered significant for the company. But often some factors are neglected that could adversely impact the business. For instance, floods, fires, global pandemics (like Covid-19), cyberattacks, etc., can cause the business to go for a toss if there are no measures to counter these unpredicted events. Hence, importance should be given to the concept of business continuity planning. In the wake of digitalization, every business must also focus and abide by the digital infrastructure continuity plan checklist.
What is a digital infrastructure continuity plan?
It is a holistic approach for handling the technology systems in a business during a major disruption. The IT service continuity plan is the collection of policies, procedures, and certain tools via which a business can improve its potential to address and respond during major IT system failures. Moreover, there is also an improvement in the resilience to major disruptions assuring that there are no more failures to the critical IT systems. In simple words, it is all about the process of an organization coping up, recovering from setbacks and failures, and maintaining productivity amidst catastrophic incidents.
Stages of IT continuity plan
When considering a digital infrastructure continuity plan, four stages come into the light. They are as given below:
- Initial response
This is the first stage where the response management team assesses the damages and there is an invocation of the apt incident management team members.
- Service recovery
This is one such phase that might be staged and there are chances of degraded services.
- Service delivery in unprecedented situations
In this stage, interim measures might be included like relocation of services to other sites and utilization of spare tools. This is a temporary measure offered until the normal service resumes
- Resume of normal services
This is the final stage when the abnormal service delivery returns to the usual services.
The information included in the IT service continuity plan management
An IT continuity plan includes the following detailed information:
- IT Architecture
- Invocation processes
- Roles and tasks of team members
- IT requirement gap analysis
- RTO and RPO details
- Damage evaluation
- Contact details
- Fail-back processes
- Incident logs
- Escalation charts
- Process flow charts
- Recovery of every IT system component
- Test plans of every IT system component recovered successfully
- IT test plan
Conclusion
To minimize or eliminate the risks of IT outages, improving the whole business environment is important. The digital infrastructure continuity plan checklist contains phase-wise strategy management driven by risks, experience, budget, and changing user requirements. Every business is required to be prepared with its continuity plan so that it is ready to cope up and tackle any challenges that come in the way. There should be a continuity team consisting of visionary leaders who can analyze the impact of the disaster and can protect the critical aspects of the business. In the competitive market, the businesses should also update their continuity plans with the latest technologies and SOPs and have an edge over other rivals in the industry.
