FFIEC BCP Booklet Update

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council has released an update to their 2003 booklet on Business Continuity Planning. The booklet "provides guidance to assist examiners in evaluating financial institution and service provider risk management processes to ensure the availability of critical financial services."

I have only skimmed over the 132 pages so far, but it seems to be a very nice publication. Since I had not read the 2003 version - it's all new to me. :)

Check it out here

CARVER Method

As I mentioned early off in this blog -- I 'think' I know BCP and DR concepts, but at a pretty intro/101 level. Well, tonight I learned about a (new to me) cool concept, and sure enough, it dates back to World War II. :)

I was reading a December post at SearchDataCenter.com about "avoiding DR pitfalls" and the author talked about the CARVER Matrix.

"CARVER is an old scheme dating back to World War II and stands for criticality, accessibility, recoverability, vulnerability, effect, recognizability. The idea is to list as many assets with descriptions as possible and rank them one to five in each point to help you determine the vulnerability of your data center as a system."

There is a white paper linked in there article that goes into the matrix deeper. Pretty cool method to apply and think about when writing DR and BCP documents and processes.

Recover from a non-disaster

Just a quick link to a good article over at SearchDataCenter.com. It is from Bill Peldzus and titled "Are you operationally ready to recover from a non-disaster?"

Check it out here

HP Videos

HP can sure make some cheezy videos with their marketing budget. I think the first one is a bit old, but I thought I would post it anyway. It is the XP24000 disk array and the HP research team is simulating a data center fail over for disaster recovery by blowing up the primary data center. Check out this video, complete with hollywood narration, here.

Looking for something a bit more silly? ok.....

Business Discontinuity

The Data Center Journal has a nice article on " Business Discontinuity – 5 Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them". To summarize, the 5 mistakes are:

1. Appointing the Incident Management Team late
2. Assuming the incident will happen at 2am on a Sunday morning
3. Assuming muster points will be available
4. Trying to scare senior management into addressing BCM
5. Forgetting about the importance of employee awareness

check out the article here

Value of Business Continuity Planning

Twin Cities Business Magazine has a nice article on BCP and a couple of case studies. It profiles two companies and their approach to BCP and discusses BIA (business impact analysis).

The good news is that when companies are able to put a dollar value or ranking on the potential impact of various events on their business, they generally find that the number is far higher than the investment required to fund a business continuity plan.

Check out the article here