: Dejan Kosutic
: Becoming Resilient - The Definitive Guide to ISO 22301 Implementation The Plain English, Step-by-Step Handbook for Business Continuity Practitioners
: Advisera Expert Solutions Ltd
: 9789535745235
: 1
: CHF 30.20
:
: Sonstiges
: English
: 207
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

Author and experienced business continuity consultant Dejan Kosutic has writtenBecoming Resilient with one goal in mind: to give you the knowledge and practical step-by-step processes you need to successfully implement ISO 22301-without any stress, hassle or headaches.


This book is written for beginners in the field and is structured in such a way that someone with no prior experience or knowledge about business continuity. It will help you fully understand the subject and implement an entire business continuity project.


If you are an IT administrator, information security professional, quality manager, or a project manager with a task to implement ISO 22301 in your company, this book is perfect for you. However, this book will be also useful for consultants and experienced business continuity practitioners. It can be used as a checklist for getting a comprehensive and structured view of how business continuity should be implemented.


Becoming Resilient is a step-by-step guide that takes you from an introduction of ISO 22301 to the implementation of the business continuity standard. During the process, Dejan uses plain English to explain:


  • Common misunderstandings of the standard: 'Business continuity is a job for IT guys;' 'Business continuity equals business continuity plans;' 'Business continuity is a one-time job;' and others.
  • How to present the benefits to your top management: 'Reason number one for business continuity project failures? The number one problem most business continuity practitioners are emphasizing? The answer is the same - lack of management understanding and commitment.'
  • How to develop a Business Impact Analysis Methodology, an Incident Response Plan, a Business Recovery plan and other crucial actions to implement and maintain the ISO 22301 standard.

Leaving the technical jargon to the geeks,Becoming Resilient is written for everyone, using plain, simple language. Whether you're a business continuity practitioner or new to the field, it's the only book you'll ever need on the subject of ISO 22301 implementation.

1
INTRODUCTION


1.1 Why business continuity?

Meet Jack. Since his early childhood, Jack has spent most of his free time on computers; he dreamed of becoming a programmer once he grew up. His dream came true – during his last year in university he came up with an idea for a groundbreaking software that will help banks serve their clients better. After graduating, he borrowed some money, invited two of his friends to work for him, and started developing the business. After one year he became profitable, and after three years he already had 25% of the market share and a nice team of 10 people.

Only a couple of days after he made a big investment into new equipment and development tools, he came one morning to his office, only to find the door smashed – since they were the only company in the building, the thieves had enough time to take all the valuables from the office, including computers. All this wouldn’t be so bad if they had a backup; they surely did make the backup, but because of the banking regulations they couldn’t store their backup in the cloud, so they backed up all the data on disks which they archived next to the servers – these disks were also stolen.

He went bankrupt – all the code they were developing for years was lost, as well as all the client data. Since he asked his parents to pledge their property as collateral for his bank loan, they were forced to sell their family house. Jack was never able to get into business again.

Moral: it doesn’t take a tsunami to destroy your business, let alone hackers – it can be a much more prosaic reason like described above. But most of all, it is the “It is not going to happen to me” syndrome that kills companies and destroys lives.

1.2 Why is planning important?

Meet Pamela. She was more prudent that Jack, and made sure her marketing company kept her backup in two different locations. Not only that, her company went a step further and developed a mini disaster recovery site where they installed all the spare servers that could be used in case their main servers (i.e. primary location) became unavailable.

On a nice sunny day a fire broke out, spreading so rapidly so that it wasn’t possible to save any of the computers or the documentation. Pamela was thinking rapidly – “Luckily, no one was hurt, and we do have everything we need at a disaster recovery location.” So she ordered everyone to go to this secondary location; but there, chaos ensued. Everyone started to panic, and no one knew what to do or what to start with: IT guys were not sure which system they should recover first; key account managers didn’t know which clients to call and what to tell them; office administrators knew that part of the paper documentation was missing, but weren’t sure how to recover it. No one knew how quickly they needed to respond to their customers. As if that wasn’t enough, they couldn’t recover one of the servers because it turned out that the only person who knew the root password to that server happened to be on a vacation in South America, unreachable by cell phone.

The result: Pamela’s company managed to recover their operations, but it took a full week. By then, 80% of their clients had left them.

Moral: technology is an important element of business continuity, but certainly not sufficient; something else needs to exist: knowledge of the business needs, a clear course of action on what needs to be done, and people who know how to react.

If I may use a military parallel here, business continuity is for a company what an army is for a country – it may cost a lot, not many people see its purpose, it takes a lot of training to maintain it, it is (hopefully) used very rarely, but when it is used it saves the country.

1.3 What business continuity is not

There are many myths about business continuity management, and without clearing up these fallacies it would be very difficult to understand what business continuity is all about:

Business continuity is a job for IT guys. Very often the perception of business continuity is that it is enough to make a backup, a few plans on how to restore your main servers, and – if you’re a bit more ambit