Streamlining BCDR preparation and ensuring teams have timely, trusted information to react effectively in a crisis situation.

Huddle for Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Planning

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Huddle for Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Planning

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3 Executive summary

4 Agile, accurate response to disaster situations

4 Business continuity versus disaster recovery

5 The perils of putting the BCDR plan together

6 Ensuring the BCDR plan timely, accurate and trusted

7 Huddle: a secure, flexible approach to BCDR planning and maintenance

10 Secure, collaborative BCDR planning and maintenance with Huddle

11 About Huddle

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARYBusiness Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) planning limits the impact of disruptions to public services delivery or business operations. In today’s interconnected world, virtually every aspect of a company’s operation is vulnerable to disruption. Some risks could take your business offline for days, but in a competitive environment, even minutes of downtime could prove fatal.

However, the preparation, maintenance and execution of a BCDR plan can be a disaster in itself for many organizations. A reliance on email or file sharing platforms to build and maintain the BCDR plan can easily lead to fragmented and overlapping communication, issues with version control (who knows which is the most up-to-date BCDR plan?) and an inability to securely share BCDR plans with third-party agencies, such as the emergency services. When disaster strikes, it is also imperative that BCDR managers have mobile access to the latest plan: there’s no point in having a plan if it sits on a physical server, sealed off because of a local chemical leak. It needs to be on your tablet or smartphone so you can take immediate pre-emptive action and continue operations.

In this Huddle Executive Briefing, we examine how Huddle for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery addresses the joint challenge of preparing the BCDR plan and helping those responsible for BCDR to react more quickly and effectively to a crisis situation.

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AGILE, ACCURATE RESPONSE TO DISASTER SITUATIONSHow quickly could your organization recover from a disaster or an unexpected event and resume operations? For public sector and commercial organizations—large or small—it is imperative that the company has a BCDR plan in place to quickly re-commence operations. This agile responsiveness is essential in order to protect revenues, safeguard customer service and satisfaction, and sustain brand or shareholder value.

Disasters or unexpected events typically falls into one of two categories: natural or man-made. A natural disaster is a major adverse event resulting from the earth’s natural hazards, such as Hurricane Sandy which ripped through the East Coast of the U.S. in 2012, or the increasing prevalent flooding brought about by long periods of heavy rain. By contrast, man-made disasters are a consequence of technological or human hazards. For example, a power failure resulting from itinerant construction workers digging through a power cable, or civil unrest, such as the riots that swept through London in 2011.

BUSINESS CONTINUITY VERSUS DISASTER RECOVERYFirst, we need to clear up the distinction between business continuity and disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is the process by which you resume business after a disruptive event, such as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, or something smaller, like a computer virus. Many executives are prone to ignoring disaster recovery because disaster seems such a cataclysmic event.

Meanwhile, business continuity planning suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can carry on public services or business operations, not only after a natural calamity but also in the event of smaller disruptions. This can include illness or departure of key staffers, supply chain partner problems or other challenges. Despite these distinctions, the two terms are often married under the acronym BCDR because of their many common considerations.

Many organizations also erroneously believe that BCDR simply relates to IT: how to get the servers back up and running after a flood, or how to backup laptops in case they are stolen. In fact, BCDR plays a vital role in the operational running of every aspect of the organization: it ensures staff are safe and that every critical business function—not just IT—is available as quickly as possible in emergency situations. For example, the plan can include contingencies for business resumption, occupant emergency, continuity of operations, incident management and disaster recovery.

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THE PERILS OF PUTTING THE BCDR PLAN TOGETHERWhatever the problem—large or small—you need to be prepared. Your government department or commercial organization probably already has a BCDR plan in place that encompasses how employees will communicate, where they will go and how they will keep doing their jobs. You may be mandated to prepare a plan by the The Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which established a coherent framework for emergency planning and response.

If it doesn’t it should do…well before disaster ever strikes. Such a plan is a comprehensive statement of the consistent actions to be taken before, during and after a disaster occurs in order to recover and protect the infrastructure. Developing a BCDR plan consists of a series of integrated steps. This includes performing a risk assessment, establishing priorities for processing and operations, documenting a written plan and testing it.

However, even the preparation of a BCDR plan is a major challenge for most organizations, for the following reasons:

• Collaboration: It is difficult for your BCDR stakeholders to work together. A reliance on email to develop the BCDR plan adds to their already high volume of email content, there are issues with version control of the data and there is no clear audit process. The result is increased risk of the wrong BCDR plan being implemented, a long production cycle and reduced productivity.

• Security: Development of the BCDR plan via email or consumer file-sharing platforms like Dropbox can lead to confidential BCDR data leaving the company whenever an employee decides. You don’t want terrorist organizations, for example, finding out where your citizen data is stored and how it is protected.

• Working across the firewall: With all of the frustrating barriers in place, it’s become exponentially harder to work with third-party external agencies, such as the emergency services, law enforcement agencies and other BCDR delivery partners. Firewalls are a barrier. VPN access is a barrier. Lack of mobility is a barrier. Technical configuration is a barrier.

• SharePoint perils: SharePoint is not the appropriate tool to manage a BCDR plan. It does not lend itself to seamless collaboration across the firewall, it is generally considered unintuitive and difficult to use, and SharePoint is expensive.

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ENSURING THE BCDR PLAN TIMELY, ACCURATE AND TRUSTEDOnce the BCDR plan is written and approved, the challenges mount. You need to keep the plan up to date and ensure that all key stakeholders have immediate access to their latest version—regardless of where they are based or what device they have available to them.

Traditionally, many organizations have stored this business critical information on either corporate file servers or on removable storage devices (to enable their stakeholders to access them from outside of their organization). However, both of these approaches pose serious risks in emergency situations. Firstly, it can result in the plan not being available during the crucial moment of the emergency.

For example, if the data center experiences a fire or flood, and the corporate network isn’t accessible, then no-one will have electronic access to the plan. Crucial crisis decisions could be delayed. The same applies if copies of the report are stored on email. Removable storage devices, such as memory sticks or popular hard drives, can also easily lead to problems of version control, virus outbreaks or out of date information being used in the event of an emergency.

Secondly, the critical information contained in the plan can be out of date by the time it is used, resulting in dangerous errors, omissions or gaps in the BCDR planning and execution. For instance, the BCDR plan at a global manufacturing company calls a temporary call center for 100 agents to be established within 48 hours at a nearby training facility. The problem? That plan was written three years ago, and was never updated to reflect the fact that the call center had been re-branded, had changed location and had new contact details. It subsequently takes the manufacturer three weeks to establish the call center—much to the dissatisfaction of existing customers and the potential of lost revenue.

Mobile management also needs to be factored into the plan management. Storing the BCDR plan on a server, on a file storage application or email makes it very difficult to collaborate on the content and access in times of emergency. Stakeholders need to be able to review and comment on the BCDR plan, and have access to it on their smartphone or tablet should a crisis occur. After all, there’s little point in having a BCDR plan if the document is in the building and the building is sealed off following a chemical leak. You need to be able to access and review the most up-to-date version of the plan on your mobile device.

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HUDDLE: A SECURE, FLEXIBLE APPROACH TO BCDR PLANNING AND MAINTENANCEGovernment and commercial organizations therefore need to adopt a more collaborative, secure and flexible approach to BCDR planning and maintenance. This approach must enable all participants (whether they are staff or represent partner organizations) to work together to maintain the plan and respond to the directives of the plan should a crisis emerge.

This is where Huddle comes in. Huddle for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery has been designed from the ground up to address the challenge of making the latest BCDR plans available to those that need them—no matter what happens. The solution also removes the barriers to secure, easy and quick distribution of this such information.

This next-generation cloud-based content collaboration platform enables your organization to streamline and reduce the risk of every phase of the BCDR planning and execution. Huddle is the number one SharePoint alternative for enterprise collaboration and content management in the cloud, allowing you to share BCDR content and knowledge across the firewall with your colleagues, comment, assign tasks and approvals, and connect with the right people to maintain a compliant BCDR policy.

Huddle is particularly impressive in the government space. Enabling information to be securely shared across government departments and agencies, external contractors and partners, Huddle has been adopted to drive efficiencies and improve productivity by 80 percent of central UK government departments, including the Cabinet Office and Defra. Beyond the UK, Huddle is used to improve information management and collaboration by NASA, the Bermuda Government, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. National Park Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In addition, Huddle is used by government organizations in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Finland.

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The Government of Greenland, for example, uses Huddle to boost collaboration with national organizations. With many external parties collaborating on projects, it needed a web based portal, accessible from any device. Using Huddle, external organizations can access the workspaces from any device at any time, as long as they have the appropriate permissions. This means that the government can control who can access what content and when, which is essential for maintaining the high levels of security vital in the public sector. Moreover, Huddle provides the BCDR bonus of having everything backed up in the cloud.

Huddle for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery provides the following benefits:

1. Latest BCDR plans always at your fingertips

With Huddle’s cloud-based collaborative platform, your BCDR plan is always available, no matter whether the corporate network is available or not. You can create, manage and approve BCDR plans, ensuring all relevant stakeholders are able to collaborate on their creation and future revisions. The Huddle solution also ensures there is a complete audit trail, automated version control and approval workflow before the BCDR plan is put in place. So when disaster strikes, you can immediately determine how employees will communicate, where they will go and how they will keep doing their jobs.

2. Mobile BCDR collaboration

You can immediately access the latest BCDR plans for review, update, or approval from anywhere, at any time and on any device. Bespoke applications for iPhone, iPads and Android devices, as well as third party applications for Blackberry and Windows Phone, make Huddle the ideal fit for mobile collaboration. It provides a simple, secure way to collaborate more efficiently with your co-workers and your ecosystem of partners, suppliers and contractors when you’re on the move.

Huddle’s iOS applications also feature full and granular remote wipe capabilities. If a user is removed from a workspace or from an account, the application will remove any pertinent cached content. If a device is lost, the application’s OAuth token can be revoked, removing content from the device but retaining a user’s privileges.

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3. Quick and easy BCDR collaboration

User adoption is the most critical factor in the deployment of a collaboration and content management application. A high level of user adoption also means that you can significantly reduce training time and costs, while minimizing management issues, typical of enterprise on-premise deployments. Huddle’s user interface has been architected with the business user in mind to guarantee the highest possible adoption rates and positive ROI. Huddle’s dedicated Customer Success team can also accelerate your deployment, through user provisioning, onsite training and supporting your business users, so that IT can focus on driving innovation and empowering the organization with the most productive and cost efficient tools.

4. Secure collaboration

Some 80 percent of UK central government departments and many of the largest commercial organizations in the world, trust Huddle with their data. Huddle has exceptionally rigorous security standards, including SSAE16 certified data centers run by Rackspace to ISO27001 certification covering both our corporate and data center environments. The UK Government’s CESG department has also certified Huddle for Pan-Government Accreditation (PGA), meaning any government department can use Huddle without having to do their own risk analysis. Huddle is currently the only collaboration company to have achieved this status.

Huddle is developing a FISMA-certified instance of its platform for IQT customer agencies, the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In addition, Huddle is now the most successful Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) supplier on the UK government’s G-Cloud Framework, securing 16 percent of the 128 SaaS contracts to date and almost a quarter (23 percent) of total SaaS spend.

5. The organizational memory

Huddle is so much more than secure cloud storage. It’s the most powerful collaborative environment available for workgroups. Every piece of your BCDR content lives in one secure place— accessible, sharable, and up to date. Features such as secure workspaces, version control and audit trails, ensure you always work form the most up-to-date BCDR plan.

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6. Complete access control

Permissions determine what a user, workspace manager, or account administrator is able to do within Huddle, the BCDR workspace, or a particular folder. This ensures that only relevant stakeholders have access to the information they need and all actions are audited for compliance and governance.

7. Always available

The Huddle for Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery solution guarantees that your BCDR plans are available to you when you need them—no matter what. This is ensured through Huddle’s True Uptime Guarantee that ensures a 99.9 percent uptime service or money-back guarantee. This promise includes zero downtime for Huddle’s service updates (currently 13 per year).

8. Minimal IT intervention

Being cloud-based, Huddle requires no upfront cost, initial deployment or maintenance. This allows IT to focus on more strategic activities, and you to focus on the development and maintenance of the BCDR. With an ever growing number of extensions and an open API, Huddle can be fully integrated into your enterprise stack.

SECURE, COLLABORATIVE BCDR PLANNING AND MAINTENANCE WITH HUDDLEHuddle enables government and commercial organizations to adopt a more collaborative, secure and flexible approach to BCDR planning and maintenance. Make sure you have the latest BCDR plans available to those that need them—no matter what happens. To find out more, visit www.huddle.com

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ABOUT HUDDLEHuddle provides next generation content collaboration for the government and enterprise. Its intelligent recommendation technology delivers relevant content to Huddle users when they need it most, with no need to search. Teams and organizations work more efficiently, using Huddle’s secure cloud collaboration service that can be accessed via web browsers, desktops, or mobile devices – anytime, anywhere.

Co-headquartered in London and San Francisco and with offices in New York City, Huddle’s customers include 80 percent of Fortune 500 and 80 percent of UK government departments, as well as companies such as Kia Motors, SEGA, Unilever and P&G. The company is privately held and backed by venture capital firms DAG Ventures, Eden Ventures, Matrix Partners and Jafco Ventures.

More information can be found at www.huddle.com.

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