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technology software business continuity

A standard for business continuity

Nicki Dennis, head of market development at the British Standards Institute gives a public sector perspective on the new BS 25999 Part 1 standard

Ensuring that your organisation is able to respond to any incident that might cause disruption to normal operations or damage your reputation is all about being prepared. Examples of such incidents might include power failures, flooding, IT virus attacks, fire, strikes, etc. Business Continuity Management (BCM) is the term given to the whole process of looking after an organisation’s resilience to such unexpected incidents. It also includes the rehearsing and testing that is so vital to ensure that everyone takes onboard the continuity culture. Hence just having a plan that exists on a shelf somewhere is not enough.

As a public sector organisation, the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) may well affect you. If you are a supplier of certain goods and services delivered through local authorities it certainly will. The Act places certain duties around the continuity of supply of goods and services in the event of a major incident. Thus local authorities - and health authorities Â- may wish to ensure that their critical suppliers can continue to deliver after, or during, an incident.

Real help
Having a national standard that sets the benchmark for an appropriate level of business continuity management activity will be a real help in achieving this. Rather than having to audit all the suppliers separately to a different set of criteria, the standard may be used to make things easier for the local authority.

Another aspect of the CCA is the requirement for local authorities to act as centres of excellence and knowledge in BCM. Here again the standard can help - the standard can be signposted as an appropriate target for businesses in their area to aim for.

A further reason for public sector interest in the BCM standard is the reputation advantage your organisation may gain due to its swift and effective response to any major local incident. Going through the BCM process may give you early warning of, and a chance to take corrective action for, any weaknesses or vulnerabilities in your organisation.

Impact analysis
Importantly, the standard does not expect that organisations using it should aim to protect and recover all of its interests and activities. A key part of BCM is the impact analysis, which allows an organisation to decide which are the critical services that it supplies and to plan for recovering them first. For a public sector organisation with duties to perform under the law this can be brought together into local action and resilience plans. Some readers of Government Technology will probably be members of their local resilience forums, which will act as a co-ordinating body for each region.

Why a standard?
But why is there a need for a standard now and, for that matter, what is a standard? A standard quite simply is an agreed way of doing things. It can be at any level, between any parties. It can be a specification, a code of practice, a set of guidelines, a process, even a glossary. In the UK the National Standards Body is the British Standards Institution (BSI). We are independent of government and a non-profit distributing organisation - similar in legal status to the BBC.

The national standards produced through the BSI formal standards process (called British Standards or BSs) have special attributes. For these BSI has to obey certain rules to ensure neutrality, transparency, integrity and fairness. In particular we have to reach a full consensus of all interested parties. Standards are voluntary - used because they are useful - and the consensus has to include all relevant interests such as government, private and public sector bodies, trade associations and consumers. The intention is that standards are aspirational: a ‘good’ practice rather than a ‘general’ practice.

Best practice
Standards can therefore be a good way of finding out what is regarded as good or best practice in an area. In 2003 BSI published a Publicly Available Specification (a pre-standard developed with a small group experts that does not have full national consensus) in the area of BCM called PAS 56. This was the first such document to be available outside of the business continuity community. It was also the first step on the road to the creation of a full national best practice standard.

The standard was written by members of the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) and a group of experts covering a variety of sectors including the City of London Authority as its public sector representative. It was produced as a contribution to the business continuity debate and has given users a chance to give feedback to BSI before a full British Standard was produced. It offered the first view of what any future national standard might look like and thus helped users to move towards a consistency of approach across sectors.

As a result of the publication of PAS 56, the debate about what should be in a British Standard started in earnest. BSI collated all the comments on PAS 56 and consulted about the need for turning it into a full BS. A new BSI technical committee was formed and met for the first time in August 2005. The Business Continuity Institute nominated the Chair - Chris Green, business continuity manager for HBOS.

In order to ensure that the committee represented all stakeholders the following organisations were asked to send delegates: Continuity Forum, Survive, BCI, Emergency Planning Society (EPS), Association of Local Authority Risk Managers (ALARM), Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Civil Contingencies Secretariat, Financial Services Agency (FSA), Confederation of British Industry (CBI), Institute of Directors (IOD), Association of British Insurers (ABI) and the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). In addition representatives from the emergency services, the academic community, utilities, consultants and some specific sector specialists were asked to join.

A major concern of the committee was how to get the information into a standard in such a way as to meet the needs of organisations of all sizes. This was an important feedback from users of PAS 56 who said that they didn’t feel the Publicly Available Specification was scaleable.

BCM Lifecycle
The result is that BS 25999 has a BCM lifecycle that has wide agreement in the community.

Now that the UK has BS 25999-1:2006, supporting documents for specific sectors will be produced and made available to help users get the most from it. Also, future guidance on parts of business continuity such as testing and rehearsals, IT disaster recovery, crisis communication will be developed by the committee to add more detail for those companies that wish it. Readers should contact BSI if they wish to see their specific sector given its own guidance as we can usually commission this for them.

Finally, our standards are evolving documents and we take seriously any feedback from users about any aspects of the contents of the standard. All British Standards are kept under review, and republished with updates as necessary, so please do let me know if you have any views on improvements to BS 25999.