Ingenuity Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning Case Study
Business Impact Analysis Project for Large Financial Services Company
About the Ingenuity Customer
This Ingenuity customer is a global, diversified company that provides a broad range of financial services to investors in commercial real estate-related assets. The compnay has three core businesses: lending and mortgage banking, investments and funds management, and servicing. The company operates in North America, Europe and Asia, providing sophisticated real estate expertise and a broad range of financing solutions and resources to borrowers, investors and institutions.
About the Business Impact Analysis Project
Ingenuity was engaged by our customer to assess the organization's current ability to maintain business continuity in the event of major and minor disruptions to the technical, utility and facility environments of the company. Ingenuity executed this project through our standard Business Impact Assessment and Gap Analysis methodology. The primary objective of this assessment and gap analysis was to provide the needed information to form the basis of a living Disater Recovery Plan. A living plan, because a good Disaster Recovery Plan needs to be constantly reviewed, updated and practiced. Through our business impact analysis, risk assessment, and planning recommendations on this project, our customer had an excellent foundation for developing a comprehensive Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan for the entire organization. Further, and most importantly, this assessment was the start of a more involved effort to enable the organization to survive a disaster and to reestablish normal business operations, and to do so in a reasonable timeframe. The following goals served as our guidance through course of this project:
- Identify weaknesses and implement a disaster prevention program
- Minimize the duration of a serious disruption to business operations
- Facilitate effective coordination of recovery tasks
In detail, Ingenuity's Business Impact Analysis Methodology for this project included the following activities:
- Identified existing mission critical systems including telephony equipment, front office systems, back office systems, enterprise systems and operational support infrastructure and established benchmarks for Maximum Allowable Outages (MAO).
- For mission critical systems, reviewed the existing operational architectures, implementations, procedures and processes. For given operational scenarios established the Mean Outage Time (MOT) for each mission critical system, in each disaster scenario.
- Completed a gap analysis that depicts the difference between the Maximum Allowable Outages and the Mean Outages for each scenario
- Completed research and analysis of best practices for Operational Recovery within the financial services industry and more specifically within the investment-banking sector.
- Completed a Security Audit as it relates to the availability of the Information and Communication Systems. The security technology assessment included a review of the current hardware and software security controls used to enforce the internal security policies and procedures to ensure network and data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
- Completed an Infrastructure Audit and Assessment. This assessment focused on the resiliency of the network and systems architecture. We evaluated all infrastructure and application elements and their ability to fail-over in the event of a disruption to any inter-related component or a major system catastrophe.
- Combined the results of the gap analysis with the outcomes for the industry best practices, security audit to identify opportunities for improvements in operational recovery in the event of disaster scenarios.