Why implement BCP?

Many businesses, big and small, do not fully appreciate the importance of disaster planning until the worst happens and a disaster occurs.

Each year hundreds of companies go out of business as a result of fire, theft and other disasters and BCP is about reducing the risks of a disaster occurring in the first place and reducing the impact of a disaster should the unthinkable occur.

Many large organisations will spend thousands of pounds implementing backup systems and redundant infrastructure but business continuity planning needn't cost a fortune. Good small business BCP involves the identification of critical and/or vulnerable systems and implementing, often small, changes to improve response times should a problem occur.

As well as helping in the event of an actual disaster, BCP can raise the awareness of security issues within an organiation and can actually improve day-to-day efficiency as bottlenecks and vulnerabilities are identified and removed.

Business Impact Analysis

Business impact analysis (BIA) is a formalised process for evaluating systems and the impact their loss would have on the business. BIA informs your overall business continuity plan and can help you focus your budget on those systems that would have the biggest impact on your business.

• Identify critical functions  - Managers must ask themselves (and their staff) the following questions: "What functions are necessary to continue business operations" and "Would the loss of certain systems and functions represent a danger to business continuity?". By asking these questions its possible to identify critical functions that the business is reliant on.

• Calculate time frames  - How long could your organisation survive without the functions identified in the first step? It may be that a business can hobble on for several days or weeks but certain functions may be so critical that losing them could jeopardise the stability of a business within minutes.

• Estimate losses - How much would a loss of each function cost the business. Losses could be in the form of a direct loss of sales, for instance when an e-commerce site goes down, or could be in the form of less tangible losses such as loss of faith by customers.

Business impact analysis helps to identify those functions and assets upon which a business depends for it's survival. The true impact of an outage becomes visible and the losses associated with downtime are highlighted. This can help with the allocation of budgets as money can be spent on those systems that are most critical to the organisation and vulnerable systems hardened against downtime.  

Unified Threat Management

A UTM device is basically a specilaised firewall that sits between your router and the internal network.

A UTM scans incoming and outgoing traffic and intelligently protects you from threats in real-time by blocking suspicious data.

A UTM can protect against viruses before they even reach your network, can block SPAM, can prevent users from accessing unauthorised or illegal web sites and can warn if a hacker is attempting to penetrate the network as well as taking preventative measures to block such attacks.

Geek-Guru partner with Sonicwall and can supply, install and support their entire range of UTM devices.  

For more info please e-mail us or call the office on 0845 234 0580