What is IT Service Continuity Management?

With the rise of cybersecurity incidents and attacks, and breach events that have been taking place across all industries, IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM) is a crucial element that should be part of any business’s technology strategy. ITSCM is an organizations’ the ability of a business to continue following through with pre-determined Service Level Agreements following an interruption.

A business disturbance could be anything from a system outage to the loss of an entire website. IT Service Continuity Management handles significant disasters and system failures in the workplace that result in a high cost of downtime.

ITSCM supports your brand’s IT and data

In resolving these major organizational emergencies, ITSCM greatly assists with the development of IT infrastructure recovery plans. Maintaining your overall infrastructure health helps to support business continuity management (BCM) plans as well as timeframes.

Your IT team can benefit from working with BCM service providers. This is because the goal of a collaborative partnership is to guarantee plans and alternative service options are set before a major outage or disruption takes place.

As organizations become more dependent on IT, consistent availability of technology is crucial to their survival. In the following sections, we will explain more in depth what the goal of ITSCM is, the basic concepts, why you should implement and what that process looks like, common ITSCM activities, and the challenges and risks involved. 

Goal of IT Service Continuity Management

The goal of ITSCM is to minimize the downtime, costs, and business impact of occurrences by ensuring there are effective processes in place.

Without a dedicated team or plan of action, there are many factors that can halt incident recovery. You may have an on-call expert who is out of touch with the code after being preoccupied with other outstanding work. They may panic at the gravity of the disaster-level incident, or they might be a new member of the disaster recovery team, with less experience in managing these issues.

It is vital for your organization to have a precise and carefully crafted document in place for service continuity management. This helps to prevent any delays caused by learning curves, disaster panic, or late-night alerts.

Principles and basic concepts of ITSCM

There are a number of components that should go into your IT service continuity management plan.

Business Continuity Plan

A business continuity plan defines the necessary steps to restore business processes following a disruption. It also indicates who needs to be involved in the remediation process and what communication types are to be shared. The main purpose is to indicate all hazardous threats to business operations, and then implement preventative measures for recovery.

Business continuity plans represent a significant gap for most businesses, as 73% of businesses feel as if their business continuity levels are not up to par. These plans are often trigged by data center outages and data losses, as well as critical application failures and natural disasters.

A business continuity plan should look to address these problems as effectively as possible and in order to accomplish that, the entire organization should be engaged in order to allow the BCP to have the biggest impact.

Business Continuity Management (BCM)

The role of business continuity management is to address risks that are potentially harmful to a business. It aims to take the severity of the threat and lower it to a manageable level where recovery of business processes is feasible.

Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

The main objective of business impact analysis is to assess the impact of loss of service for a business following an incident. These plans break down types of potential losses; the anticipated damage caused by service disruptions; the staff, skills, services, and facilities required to ensure that critical business processes continue to function at acceptable levels; and the overall timeline within which the minimum levels of staff, services, and facilities should be restored

Benefits for implementing IT Service Continuity Management

IT Service Continuity Management processes are vital if you want to prepare your IT department and business for any potential disasters. When done correctly, these processes should help to reduce the disruptions in IT services during a disaster event, and reduce the associated costs of extended down times.

It should also help your team remain focused on what’s important during the crisis, which is the recovery of and renewal of IT services so that a base level of operations are possible.  

Procedure for implementation of IT Service Continuity Management

Service continuity management is a process that takes time and patience. In this section, we will go more in depth on the implementation procedure and what steps it comprises of.

Step 1: Identify Services and Assets

First off, all the services and assets that we own must be determined. What do you need at a minimum in order to deliver products or services to your customers is a major question asked during this process.

This should include all pieces of technology, hardware, software, licensing, and information on vendors that play a part of your IT infrastructure. This can also include staff and the procedures each should be following regularly so there’s an understanding of workflow and standard operating procedures under the best of conditions.

This information can be collected in the Framework for ICT Technical Support (FITS) processes. FITS Service Level Management is suggested by most risk management models as a way to understand the crucial nature of the services in possession.

Step 2: Identify Risks and Threats

Once the services and assets are determined, the risks and threats can be identified. This process enumerates all potential events (threats) and the subsequent consequences that event could have on your operational capacity (risks).

Threats could range from natural disasters to the failure or interruption of services from service providers keeping you from being able to operate. Risks resulting from these threats can be business closure or bankruptcy, harm to the brand’s reputation, an inability to meet service expectations of clients.

Step 3: Create Contingency Plans

Contingency plans are similar in structure to insurance policies. They can be simple and cost-efficient while covering minimal risks, or they can be complex and expensive while covering maximal risks.

The contingency plan for implementation is dependent on the level of risk the company is willing to take. Contingency plans first prioritize the services that need to be restored, then create backups, and lastly store them on and off site.

Step 4: Keep Record of the Recovery Plan

The recovery plan should be properly documented to guarantee that it contains all the essential data. This plan should be distributed among the key staff, who should be updated regarding any changes made to the plan. The recovery team should always have a copy in hand. Another copy should be kept off site, so it is accessible in case of emergency.