Business Continuity Planning for Distance Education

The very first step in developing a business continuity plan is to designate a committee of four to six people with the job of producing a plan within six months. This is a reasonable timeframe and will keep the project moving in the face of hesitancy to invent new policies and procedures. Committee members should understand that continuity planning is not like medicine, where self-diagnosing your own ailment can produce more harm than good. Nearly any continuity plan is better than nothing at all, and the resulting plan will be under constant revision and update anyway. The goal is to produce a sound starting point to an ongoing process. The next step is identifying any continuity plans that already exist at the institution. Each campus is organized differently, but generally the three areas that need to be contacted are information technology (IT) , facilities management, and security. Distance education units rely on IT for many of their data needs, including student registration and recordkeeping. It is important to know how they back up their information and what their plans for recovery are during an emergency. The information provided will inform continuity planning. For instance, most institutions back up student data, but how long would it take to load those backups if the originals were lost? Also consider hardware failures. At Norwich University we discovered that if the air conditioning to the server room cuts out in the middle of the night, the temperature will steadily rise until the servers melt down, leaving no place to load the backups. It could take one or two weeks to secure and configure new servers. This told us that we had to plan for the possibility that the student record system is unavailable for one or two weeks. Facilities management and security need to be involved in the planning process from the very beginning, as they will be involved in response and recovery from an emergency. These units can provide information about institutional response procedures, the resources available in an emergency, and what can be done to assist in recovering processes. Meetings with these units will lead to plans for alternate work locations and for getting the locations up and running. Any other units affected by use of the facilities will also need to be involved, which should lead to agreements on securing the locations in an emergency. Never assume that resources will be available unless there are prior agreements with all of the relevant parties. An institution-wide event can easily lead to territorialism, leaving alternate work locations unused while parties fight to preserve their own situation. Working with facilities management and security will ensure that there is a coordinated response plan that meets all of the distance education unit's needs. Ideally, units should also know the capabilities and limitations of the local first responder community-police, firefighters, and others-to understand the resources that they can provide. The last step is to go outside the institution by looking at the business continuity plans of important vendors. At Norwich University, we outsource our marketing and online classroom hosting. A robust continuity plan was one of the requirements for choosing this vendor. If you rely on another business for an important process, you want to make sure that they will be there for you before entering into an agreement. Our vendor's continuity plan outlined response and expected downtimes in different situations, which told us what we could expect from them. Vendors may also be able to provide assistance during an incident. We have an agreement with our classroom hosting partner to provide us with emergency e-mail accounts if our own system is lost. Units must also consider the security of information critical to their operation that is held by outside parties. We could not operate without our classrooms, which are hosted by an outside company. We are looking to have a third party hold an escrow copy of that information in case something happens to our vendor.

sumber:http://booksc.org/book/31766516