Everyone is aware of the theories of Business Continuity Planning, ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and ISO 22301:2012 with IT Service Continuity, and there are numerous consultancies and white papers on how to setup such a policy and service for your company. With so many great resources available for IT Crisis Management, what could possibly be difficult?
The difficulties usually start in recognising when is a service outage a cause to invoke IT Service Continuity and when does the Continuity plan trigger a Disaster plan? From a few real world examples, I will go through and describe all the interactions that occur between your Systems/Networks Operations Center, Security Operations Centers, Manager on Duty (MoD or Crisis Manager), Data Center Operations Teams, Service Lines, Application Managers, IT Managers and Senior Business Managers. Then there are all the decisions that need to be made on the journey to achieve full IT Service and all the communications that must occur. Finally, what are the personality traits and capabilities you should you look for in your Manager on Duty (who can also be known as The Master of Disaster).
