MSTA Online - MSTA Guidelines

The MSTA Guidelines for Business Continuity Planning

The MSTA Guidelines provided here are the culimination of 18 years of experience and the formulation of several hundred business continuity plans.

This special, online version of the MSTA Guidelines is in a highly distilled format. Please contact us if you have any questions or queries about our unique approach to business continuity planning.

These Guidelines are provided free of charge to end users, and we hope you find them useful while planning your business continuity requirements. A downloadable version of the MSTA Guidelines is available on the downloads web page.

1. Background to business continuity planning

1.1 Early IT disaster recovery

2. Establishing the business continuity planning project

2.1 Securing Main Board Sponsorship and Support
2.2 Selecting a Methodology
2.3 The 'Minimalist Approach'

3. Applying the chosen planning methodology

3.1 Identification of Threats to Business Operations
3.2 Operational Risk Reduction - and the Residual Risk
3.3 Calculation of Budget
3.4 Justification of Budget
3.5 Source of Budget
3.6 Assessment of Existing Recovery Provisions
3.7 Building a Targeting Strategy

4. Business Continuity planning tasks

4.1 Establishing the Recovery Philosophy
4.2 Conducting a Business Impact Analysis
4.3 Prioritising Business Functions
4.4 Identifying Key Resources
4.5 Choosing a Recovery Strategy
4.6 Applying MSTA, Minimalist Theory to the Development of Recovery Plans
4.7 Determining Appropriate Phasing

5. Developing a draft BC plan document

5.1 Gold, Silver, Bronze & MSTA's Four 'Special' Teams
5.2 Planning Infrastructure and Resource Needs
5.3 Developing Draft Plans
5.4 Incorporating Escalation Preferences
5.5 Attaining Consensus

6. Building the recovery environment

6.1 Implementing the Recovery Environment
6.2 Incorporating Salvage Procedures
6.3 'Cold site' Selection and Equipping
6.4 Back-to-Base Project Implementation

7. Business Continuity plan distribution, maintenance, testing, training

7.1 Preparing Different Versions of the BC Plan
7.2 Distributing the Plan Documentation
7.3 Maintaining the Plan
7.4 BC Plan Testing
7.5 Staff Training
7.6 Pre-Implementation Test Cycle
7.7 Partial Invocation

8. Ongoing monitoring and control of business continuity issues

8.1 Incorporating Business Continuity Issues in IT Projects
8.2 Monitoring Functions of the Business Continuity Co-Ordinator
8.3 Monitoring and Controlling Functions of the Business Continuity Planning Committee
8.4 BCP - Performance Monitoring and Control