Business Continuity Plan – Scenario 1

Business Continuity Plan – Scenario 1

Business Continuity Plan – Scenario 1

Subject: General Questions    / College life    

Question

Business Continuity Plan – Scenario 1

A small company, DJ’s Automotive and Auto-body, you are responsible for managing all desktop, servers, networks and database systems. The company has a client list of nearly 1 Thousand customers and does annual business of over $700 Thousand dollars. All these clients are within the same city and the business only operates day time on week days, and half a day Saturday.

 

DJ’s counts on you to do all of its IT work, though it has a clerk with a computer, the accountant who works half a day each week shares a desktop PC with you. They run windows 98, to which you upgraded their accounting package Dynacom wouldn’t run in windows 3.1 any longer. The clerk counts on a DSL connection to look up and find parts so he can prepare repair estimates. You work there every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon from 1 to 5pm.

 

There is a customer contact list system, which was written by a Fanshawe CPA co-op student and runs with Microsoft Access. It runs on the clerks PC, a Pentium 4 2.66Ghz machine. The system is typically within a day of current, as the clerk updates the entries from shipping slips and repair invoices.

 

Their Accounts Payable, Receivable, General Ledger and Payroll is a COTS system written in Quebec, Dynacom Pro. It also runs on the clerks machine. He issues invoices through the day, as jobs are completed, and in consultation with the mechanics. Accounts Payable, are resolved weekly and pay cheques are issued every Wednesday for the previous weeks hours.

 

Their price quoting software is a COTS package designed for small mechanical and body shops, Autoprise it is located on your PC but the clerk accesses data from that system through a shared directory.

 

All employees are paid weekly based on their hourly rate and the number of hours they worked in the calendar week (Sunday to Saturday). The floor manager fills out time sheets which the clerk enters at the beginning of each week.

 

There is no code repository; currently the database code is stored on the clerk’s machine in the database program’s directory “c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11”. The code isn’t stored any place else, and has not changed since it was created.

 

On the floor there are two diagnostic computers which store configuration information on their hard drives. The information is updated every couple months to work with newer models of cars. The updates are downloaded to your PC then transferred on floppy disk to the diagnostic machines. The updates are coded to install only on the machine it was licensed to. It is your job to keep track of those licenses. These machines are worth over $15 thousand each.

 

There is also a laser guided electronically controlled frame bending/aligning system.It is on the same network as your PC’s and it needs access to the web to do occasional AI firmware updates.

 

Several custom repair manual sets are stored on your PC, so the chief mechanic refers to your machine on a regular basis. She isn’t particularly good about minimizing open windows on your machine, she often just closes the programs without saving changes.

 

The company’s two PC’s are connected to each other and the net using a D-Link DI-704UP 4 port Broadband Router and USB Printer Server. The company’s only printer is attached to that router.

 

There currently are no surge suppressors or UPS systems for any of the equipment

 

An assortment of documents is stored by different people all over the PC’s. There are no controls on where people put their documents.

 

 

 

What you need to do:

 

Create a “disaster avoidance & recovery” plan outlining what needs to be done to avoid disaster and also get the business back up and running in the event of a complete disaster (fire, flood, “act of God” – in other words, all the equipment is gone). Focus only on the IT equipment, software, and infrastructure.

 

In order to explain how the data would be recovered, you will also need to address some sort of disaster prevention procedures – i.e. when and how data is backed up, to where, etc.

 

 

Some questions to get you started:

 

    Backups: Identify everything that should be backed up. For each, how often should it be backed up? Full? Incremental? Logs? For each, determine the media you would use. Who will perform each of these, and how will they be done? User initiated? Automated?

 

 

 

    How would you replace the equipment? Where would you get it from? How much would it cost? How long would it take to arrive and set up? How many people would it take?

 

 

    What risks do you see in your plan? How would you minimize these risks?

 

 

    How will you ensure that your plan will actually work in the event of a disaster?

Come up with abrief (butcomplete)

plan for avoiding downtime and getting

back up and running.

Please use a .doc professional report

format. (2-3 pages)