New trends shows that safe and yet flexible working environment is becoming a basic expectation. This also brings an increasing role for IT solutions to respond to the ever-increasing data transmission and access needs.<\/p>\n
Business continuity is key, but it should not be overcomplicated either. The methodology for creating a BCP solution that is tailored to the actual business needs includes four main phases<\/strong> that we describe below step-by-step.<\/p>\n Identifying the business-critical processes and data<\/strong><\/p>\n Knowing our key business processes and data is essential. Besides that, it is also necessary to define the standards, regulatory and compliance requirement that apply to these processes.<\/p>\n Understanding of the business impact<\/strong><\/p>\n It’s important that based on quantifiable metrics we rank processes according to the severity of the risk and the probability of occurrence. That helps to determine the most critical processes that should be addressed at first place in the continuity plan as well as the processes that can be handled later.<\/p>\n Defining and implementation of the business continuity solution<\/strong><\/p>\n Once you know the key business processes and their impacts you should define the roles and responsibilities of the BCP team and the frequency of integrated testing. In addition, it is also important to create internal and external BCP communication plans.<\/p>\n Organizational discipline<\/strong><\/p>\n All the steps should rely on a team capable of assessing, prioritising, and implementing processes knowledge and technology as well as communicating across the organisation.<\/p>\n Backup and recovery<\/strong><\/p>\n Besides the key steps, backup and recovery are also indispensable part of a BCP, so these also must be handled with the right importance. Although they are technically two different aspects of BCP, in most cases they can be considered parallelly, as the same business and compliance requirements apply and also the technology required to implement the two is generally the same.<\/p>\n Business continuity with Azure<\/strong><\/p>\n With this sophisticated cloud service of Microsoft, all services (internal and external) can be individually mapped and shared. It’s based on a set of compliance tools that address privacy, security, Business Continuity Management, and other issues. Azure is still the one and only cloud service that has the ISO 22301 certificate, which is the highest standard on the market. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a great tool that keeps your workload online when the worst happens. Azure Site Recovery can replicate workloads from the primary site (locally or in Azure) to a secondary location. If a failure occurs, you can refer to the disaster recovery plan, and the ASR will move (the workload) to the secondary location, so that you can continue to work, and when the primary site becomes operational again, it can get back to there.<\/p>\n