Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

When disaster strikes, whether natural or manmade, can your organization recover quickly and seamlessly? Do you have a plan in place to ensure that you don’t lose any critical data? Are your people prepared?

A disaster includes any unplanned business outage of sufficient duration to cause unacceptable loss to an organization or to drive the timed redeployment of limited resources. Losses can be tangible such as revenue losses, increased costs and contractual penalties, as well as intangible such as detrimental impacts to goodwill and public perception.

Axafina helps businesses and governments the world over to prepare for, and recover from, disasters; enabling them to continue on their path to superior results without sacrificing losses to customers and citizens. The Axafina approach embeds business continuity and disaster recovery planning strategies, policies and decision making within the organization.

This ensures that disaster recovery is not a one-off activity, but an ongoing management process. While assessing risk, the approach focuses on tangible business losses as well as intangible business impacts such as regulatory exposure and shareholder confidence. In this way, appropriate mitigation strategies are defined for a broad range of assets including information technology, buildings, people and business processes, to name a few.

Axafina has the experience, capabilities and expertise to best help you with all your business continuity and disaster recovery plans:

• Proven global business continuity and disaster recovery assets and tools: Axafina has an established and specialized set of methods and tools for recovery planning projects including planning questionnaires and surveys, impact models and established continuity plans. These industry-leading assets and practices help ensure comprehensive content, validated solutions and rapid implementations.
• Global business continuity and disaster recovery credentials: Axafina has relevant disaster recovery, business continuity, business process and technology experience worldwide. This experience is gained by working with leading global and national corporations (Global 500 and Fortune 500), as well as small and mid-size firms representing a large cross-section of industries.
• Global operational understanding and distribution of resources: Axafina’s global business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities include more than 200 skilled experts worldwide.
• Solution-agnostic, independent operation and objectivity: Axafina maintains a high level of objectivity by being solution-agnostic; offering objective advice on strategic business continuity and disaster recovery alternatives as well as vulnerabilities and recommendations without solution preference or focus biases.

Axafina offers two recovery planning methodologies—one primarily for the information technology environment and another focusing on the business from an enterprise-wide perspective.

Axafina’s recovery plan provides guidelines for:

• Determining when and how to declare that a disaster has occurred.
• Migrating business resources, as appropriate, to recover the business.
• Restoring mission-critical operations and business processes.
• Preparing for the resumption of normal operations.
• Transitioning reduced-level operations to full-time capability.
• Assessing and quantifying the severity of an unplanned interruption or outage.

Recovery planning objectives include:

• Minimizing the interruption to critical business operations from manifested risks.
• Limiting the tangible and intangible losses that may be incurred as a result of a disaster or extended business outage.
• Avoiding or limiting legal and/or regulatory issues.
• Simplifying the decision-making and resource movement processes during a stressful situation.
• Providing for a controlled return to normal operations.
• Establishing a plan that is maintainable in a dynamic business environment.