WHAT IS BUSINESS CONTINUITY?
Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is about establishing a set of pre-emptive measures to ensure an organisation can continue to function in the face of the unexpected. In the context of IT this essentially means ensuring availability of, and access to data.

WHY DO I NEED BUSINESS CONTINUITY?
Aside from the fact that 2005 has been described as the “Worst Year on Record” (hurricanes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, explosions, floods), two Government statistics emphatically highlight why every responsible organisation should have a Business Continuity Plan in place:

• 80% of businesses affected by a major incident close within 18 months
• 90% of businesses that lose data from a disaster are forced to shut within two years.

Moreover customers, stakeholders, partners and insurance companies tend to place far greater value on organisations that have invested some time and effort in putting together a coherent suite of continuity measures.

WHAT DO I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BUSINESS CONTINUITY?
Business Continuity shares a common problem with IT Security in that it is very difficult to establish its bottom-line value to a company; in both cases return on investment only becomes accurately calculable after an event. Organisations must instead, estimate the tangible and not-so-tangible losses likely to be incurred as a result of unplanned downtime, and balance these against any proposed expenditure on countermeasures. The matrix below gives a simplified overview of how such costs can be quantified.

Once an organisation has estimated the overall cost of its downtime and decided to invest in provisioning for IT continuity, there are three broad areas to consider:

• Prevention – measures to reduce the likelihood of the unexpected happening in the first place.
• Continuity – measures to reduce the impact of the unexpected if it does happen.
• Recovery – measures to reduce the time it takes to return to ‘business as usual’.

WHAT BUSINESS CONTINUITY SERVICES DOES PROGRESSIVE NETWORKS OFFER?
Progressive Networks offers a full suite of IT-related Business Continuity measures to help your organisation face the unexpected.

• Network Audit – To identify single points of failure
• Security Audit – To identify potential vulnerabilities
• Resiliency Services – To eliminate single points of failure
• Co-location Services – To provide server redundancy and failover
• Data Backup Services – To ensure on-demand data availability