Strong Link Data’s consulting philosophy is centered on knowledge transfer leaving our client well trained, knowledgeable and self sufficient. We begin each engagement planning how to achieve this objective.
Overview
Knowledge, Experience, Talent & Tools
Continuity consulting services designed to fit your business, utilizing proven, scalable and sustainable methods.
Strong Link Data (SLD) is a privately held consulting services company focused on Business Continuity (BC), Continuity of Operations (COOP), Continuity of Government (CoG), IT disaster recovery (IT-DR) and other continuity, organizational resiliency, and risk management disciplines. SLD has a highly flexible approach that easily scales to meet your organization’s needs. SLD’s consulting team is staffed with subject matter experts (SMEs) in all of the Continuity disciplines.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
Whether you are meeting senior executives for the first time or looking to update detailed BIA findings generated each planning cycle, SLD tailors each BIA project to the customer’s needs and requested scope. For our Federal government and military clients, continuity standards mandate determination of mission essential functions (MEFs). The BIA is the proven, effective methodology to document impacts caused by disruption to justify designation as an MEF. The BIA is also the most effective means of uncovering critical dependencies without which MEFs can function.
Continuity Program Design
You have been asked to initiate a continuity program and are looking for the latest best practices to start your program. SLD has the expertise and methods to ensure program granularity will be properly balanced to meet management objectives as well as cost and resource constraints while achieving repeatable, sustained Continuity capability across the organization.
Continuity Planning
Continuity planning is not a short term project. Continuity planning must be treated as a repeatable process involving the appropriate stakeholders across the organization. SLD’s consultants are highly trained in the leading planning methods and software tools. SLD can assist you in defining an appropriate level of detail in populating your plan components.
Exercises and Testing
SLD consultants have the experience and tools to help your organization plan and conduct exercises and tests of any type and scale. We assist clients with a variety of testing initiatives, including senior level management events and building exercises of self-directed drills.
Business Impact Analysis
Strong Link Data (SLD) offers a variety of business impact analyses for specific organization objectives, conditions and custom analysis requirements. SLD has the resources, methods and templates to get started quickly and produce high quality results.
BIA Methods, Templates and Tools
Highly adaptable toolset to meet client BIA goals. SLD has a comprehensive templates and methods library which includes numerous BIA tools such as:
- Questionnaires
- Data collection surveys
- Findings and recommendation formats
- Project plans
Recovery Requirements
A key output of any BIA may be to quantify recovery requirements for critical operations, supporting processes, systems, suppliers and assets. SLD can include defining the following attributes within its BIAs:
Recovery Time Objective (RTO):
How long can critical operations or support resources be unavailable before they must be recovered to minimum recovery capability?
Time to Disruption (TTD):
How long can a critical support service or system (i.e., IT application used by a critical function) be unavailable before it causes the primary function to fail?
Recovery Point Objective (RPO):
How much historical data must be retained?
BIA Services
SLD offers the following BIA services:
Enterprise BIA is a method to engage, educate and gain senior leadership commitment to an appropriately scaled continuity program design and how it can be implemented across the ‘in-scope’ organization. Executive participation is crucial to sustaining your continuity program. The Enterprise BIA accomplishes 4 objectives:
1. Engage executives to discuss the ‘business case’, work effort and approach alternatives to implement a sustainable continuity program, including starting to build senior management support and commitment.
2. Facilitate dialog with executives to document perspective on the level of impact that becomes intolerable – an essential ingredient to determining which functions are “critical”
3. Reach agreement with executives on guidelines to set recovery requirements (Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives) for critical operations
4. Define continuity planning scope and prioritize launch sequence for all operations included in program launch.
When senior leadership involvement is high, it is possible to dramatically accelerate continuity program design by expanding on the Enterprise BIA to include prioritizing critical operations through formal documentation of senior leadership input on disruption risks, exposures and impacts. The successful Executive BIA results in documented recovery requirements for each ‘in scope’ function, service or operation alleviating significant work that would be required of mid-level management to obtain these same essential continuity planning criteria on a more tactical basis. SLD offers its clients 3 alternative Executive BIA approaches:
1. Materiality approach: focuses on defining financial and operational thresholds for business continuity planning and investment. Benefits: Quickly target continuity program resources on sites and operations that have the most significant impact on financial performance, thus deploying limited continuity planning resources most efficiently.
2. Impact assessment approach: focuses on quantifying how long targeted operations and functions can be disrupted before agreed upon impact criteria reach unacceptable levels. Benefits: Engage leadership to set recovery requirements for functions and services performed across the organization thus eliminating need to conduct more time consuming ‘ground up’ traditional BIA.
3. Intuitive Interview approach: focuses on a tailored 1 hour interview format with targeted executives to define guidelines for conducting more rigorous BIA activities within their organization. Benefits: Having the executives input ahead of time can reduce or eliminate debate about relative importance of operations that can often bog down a traditional BIA.
When senior leadership is not participating, or as an instrument of a more rigorous or granular continuity planning initiative, it may be appropriate to conduct a traditional BIA engaging operations management in assessing risks and documenting impacts to derive needed recovery requirements. The Recovery BIA is the traditional process for determining which departmental functions should be designated as “Mission Essential Functions” (MEFs).
The Application Impact Analysis does for your IT department what the BIA does for the rest of your operation – it provides your IT managers with valuable recovery requirement information derived from the operating departments. SLD helps your IT department define recovery requirements for targeted applications by engaging the operations department to articulate how long their critical operations can function without access to these systems. With this application data, SLD consultants can further assist your IT department to define the IT infrastructure recovery requirements and systems recovery prioritization.
Strong Link Data is often asked to update historical BIAs performed as part of an earlier effort. Our consultants can help your organization to quickly assess how best to leverage historical data to meet your current objectives, tailor your existing templates or utilize SLD’s proven methods and tools to efficiently gather, analyze and report BIA findings and recommendations. A key objective of every SLD consulting engagement is to ensure the sustainability of the work we perform – meaning, when we update your BIA, we also ensure you have an actionable plan to keep it updated in the future.
Continuity Program Design
What if your entire management team was skilled in a proven continuity discipline following a simple standardized methodology? Over time planning sophistication could be enhanced as they gain confidence through success. But to implement this enterprise process, you need a winning strategy and commitment from senior management and those who will support the program. Think of this in the same way your management team knows how to prepare a budget and conduct employee performance reviews. They have discipline and methods they must apply and a support infrastructure that ensures consistency of results and sustainability of the program. As with budgeting and performance reviews, continuity skill must be instilled in every manager who has responsibility for critical functions.
To get started, Strong Link Data can help you design the implementation strategies you will need to design your program and obtain executive commitment to the plan. SLD’s proven approach integrates a highly customizable executive business impact analysis with our unprecedented success at designing practical, achievable continuity programs.
The executive BIA engages executives to understand the work effort required to implement a sustainable continuity program.
Through interviews, SLD’s consultants assess organization exposures, threats and risks and the adverse impacts that might occur. Furthermore, we reach agreement with executives on prioritizing recovery of critical operations and define the launch sequence for all operations to be included in continuity program scope. This could be only business recovery, IT-disaster recovery, crisis management or some integrated combination of these central continuity disciplines.
In parallel, we work with your continuity ‘in house team’ to:
- Define resources (continuity delivery organization) required to achieve a sustainable program
- Develop the implementation plan based on thorough understanding of work to be done and how it can be practically achieved within the organization
- Document costs, timetable and resource requirements to achieve objectives
- Gain senior management commitment and participation in the program launch
Through many years of practical experience and in recognition of the importance of senior management commitment, Strong Link Data has developed a highly efficient continuity delivery organization model that is applied to all initiatives we undertake. This model is sensitive to workload distribution between internal and consulting resources. Strong Link Data is committed to maximizing knowledge transfer while minimizing client’s consulting costs. As such, SLD involves client resources early and wherever prudent and practical. Our Project SME will work with you to identify the project resources and define a program delivery organization that best achieves these results.
No two continuity projects are the same. Strong Link Data emphasizes the importance of tailoring it’s methods, templates and tools to each unique client’s situation and objectives. Wherever possible, SLD leverages our existing tools database to minimize project development time and client expense.
Continuity Planning
Strong Link Data (SLD) is a leader in assisting organizations to implement sustainable continuity capabilities and competency. Our core consulting philosophy respects the time constraints of project participants and seeks to ensure smooth knowledge transfer to those with on-going responsibilities.
SLD has developed an efficient, repeatable method for developing and sustaining continuity plans. This approach is highly scalable and has been successfully deployed for a variety of organizations. While the landscape for business continuity standards continues to evolve, this approach meets or exceeds the requirements of ITIL, FCD 1 & 2, DoD 3026.26 and many other published BC regulations and emerging standards.
Strong Link Data has helped both government and corporate clients to implement continuity plans that are prudent, practical and achievable. Our experienced consultants have created an extensive template library that enables us to quickly and cost-effectively assist our clients with all of their continuity planning deployment needs.
Strong Link Data provides the following planning services:
Incident management incorporates development of Crisis Management and Emergency Response Plans. In addition incident management includes engaging executives in understanding their role to provide command, control and communications leadership during a disruptive event. SLD offers a suite of services to clients looking for assistance in this important area.
IT disaster recovery incorporates development of recovery plans for the:
- critical applications
- data center infrastructure
- other IT assets and shared services
Frequently IT has already built some level of disaster protection and has struggled to engage the rest of the organization in defining realistic recovery objectives. As a result, there will be gaps in IT’s recovery strategy. In some cases, critical applications and technical infrastructure may be inadequately protected, while in other cases IT may have over invested in recovery solutions. Strong Link Data’s experts will assist your IT organization to define realistic, properly grounded recovery objectives and create new plans or modify those that already exist.
Operations recovery planning incorporates development of operations recovery plans for all targeted operations and sites. Operations recovery plans focus on defining tasks required to recover critical operations under a defined set of disaster event classes.
Operations recovery plans may also describe recovery team assignments, resource requirements (desk chairs, phones, etc.), and a variety of valuable information used to ensure smooth and prompt recovery of operations.
Exercises and Drills
The primary objectives of all exercises and drills are to validate and improve an organization’s continuity plans and strategies. Strong Link Data experts work to define clear objectives and establish an appropriate scope prior to starting any test, drill, tabletop or full-scale exercise. SLD assists organizations in exercising their various recovery components; delivering detailed findings reports which include recommendations for specific actions to be taken to improve response during an event.
Exercises and drills afford critical staff the opportunity to work together in a realistic environment in advance of an actual event. This provides practice to deal with multiple simultaneous disruptions and the ability to identify opportunities for improvement in an organization’s incident response, recovery, and reconstitution processes.
Exercise and Drill Objectives
Strong Link Data consultants facilitate the development and delivery of exercises and drills to meet targeted goals and objectives. As an example:
- Exercise the effectiveness of the communication aspects between the command management team and each team assigned with response, recovery, and reconstitution responsibility.
- Review critical processes as they are interconnected to each other to assure consistency of response.
- Cover some specific major IT aspects of response to escalating levels of pandemic outbreak.
- Challenge the group but avoid chaos.
- Construct the tabletop in such a way to maintain the interest of the group throughout the exercise.
- Introduce some people that would have never participated in a tabletop exercise of any kind to the process and benefits of a tabletop exercise.
- Utilize this tabletop in preparation for another exercise with the senior leaders from across the entire organization.
