September 11, 2001 changed everything for organizations’ security requirements and brought contingency planning to the forefront of Executive Management Planning.

It is not if but when a disaster situation happens:

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Many organizations, in particular those with Boards, have identified Contingency Planning as a mission critical element of their Business and IT Strategic Planning.

Contingency planning encompasses a number of different situations for an organization. It ranges from:

1. Specific servers / applications becoming unavailable (either for a few hours due to software or hardware issues or for several weeks due to potential unavailability of replacement hardware) to

2. Complete unavailability of the physical business facility (as a result of fire within the organizations site or other tenants within the building facility making the organization’s site unavailable, etc.)

At GSC we categorize Contingency Planning into two categories:

Redundant Site Services - Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) refers to the technology component of Contingency Planning. It is essential that an organization have technology redundancy and / or recovery plans based on the heavy reliance on technology in the business environment today.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) represents the business operations component of Contingency Planning. Where and how does the business management and operations gather to continue providing business services to their customers and ensure business value to its stakeholders? Organizations need more than simply redundant technology, they have identified the need for a location and methods to continue to operate their business with or without recovered technology.