Business Continuity Exam With Complete Solution

Business Continuity Business Continuity Plans (BCP) - An organizations ability to maintain critical business functions (CBFs) after a disruptive event BCP provides a plan to ensure the CBFs continue to operate even if disruptions happens Major Risk Mitigation Plans - Business continuity readiness involves: Business continuity planning (BCP) -Business impact analysis (BIA) -Disaster recovery planning (DRP) -Incident response planning (IRP) Elements of BCP - 1. Purposes: -Ensuring that CBFs continue to operate even after a disruption occurs. 2. Scope: -Global view of organization with concentration on CBFs Elements of BCP - 3. Assumptions and planning principles: -Length of time expected to continue operations under BCP until returning to normal conditions -Incidents to be included or excluded (e.g. hurricane, earthquakes, power human-caused) -Location(s) to consider (e.g. centralized, geographically distributed) -Transportation (e.g. required vehicles, shuttles, helicopters) -Communications (e.g. alternative methods like walkie-talkie functions -Required support (e.g. financial, technical, human resources) Elements of BCP - 4. Identifying description and architecture: -Identifying the IT domains (e.g. applications, servers, networks) that support each CBF. -Gathering information on the sensitivity of systems' data (proprietary, private, public) Elements of BCP - 5. Responsibilities: -BCP program manager: the key and leading individual -BCP coordinator: connecting the separate teams -BCP teams: -Emergency Management Team (EMT): composed of senior managers who make ultimate decisions -Damage Assessment Team (DAT): collect and analyze data with regards to incidents; do NOT take action. -Technical Recovery Team (TRT): restores CBFs by recovering IT resources (based on the BIA report). Elements of BCP - 6. Phases -Notification/activation phrase: disruption has occurred or is forthcoming) (DAT is responsible for assessing the magnitude of impact) -Recovery phase: (TRT will work on CBF restoration) -Reconstruction Phase: the goal is to return CBFs to normal conditions 7. Plan training, testing, and exercises 8. Plan maintenance Business Impact Analysis (BIA) - -An important tool for business continuity planning -Helps identify CBFs and systems(s) that support each one. -Helps identify the single point of failure -Quantifies the impact a loss of these functions These range from: -Impact on property (tangible assets) -Impact on safety (physical protection) -Impact on reputation (status) -Impact on life (well-being) -Impact on finances (monetary funding) Business Impact Analysis (BIA) - Single-loss expectancy (SLE) is the monetary value expected from the occurrence of a risk or an asset. -Single-loss expectancy (SLE)= Asset Value (AV) X Exposure factor (EF) -Annual rate of occurrence (ARO) is the probability that a risk will occur in a particular year. -For example, if insurance data suggests that a serious fire is likely to occur once in 25 years, then the annualized rate of occurrence is 1/25=0.04 -Annualized loss expectancy (ALE) is the expected monetary loss that can be expected for an asset due to a risk over one year period -ALE= ARO X SLE