The cost of Service Continuity Management is very variable. You can spend a little
or a lot depending on what you have, what the risks are and what level of risk you
consider to be acceptable. The paradox is that you have to incur some cost, even if
only in time, in order to find out what the risks might be in the first place.
|
Expenditure
|
Money might be spent on reducing risks by
buying and implementing technical solutions,
such as disk mirroring, back-up systems,
uninterruptible power supplies and so on.
Money might be spent on consultancy to carry
out the initial risk analysis and/or prepare
recovery plans.
Money might be spent on external facilities to
aid recovery, such as off-site storage of back-
up tapes, off-site availability of spare equipment
and so on.
|
|
People
|
People would be needed to manage the
process, carry out risk analysis, make any
technical changes deemed necessary, develop
plans and so on.
Recovery plans usually also involve a number of
people, including those who would be
responsible for initiating and managing the
recovery plan, those with technical
responsibilities, those with communication
responsibilities and so on. These people would
need to be involved in the development of the
plan and also in testing it.
|
|
Time
|
The amount of time involved will depend on how
advanced the school is in implementing
processes such as FITS. Some of the work is
done in other processes - for instance,
identifying services (Service Level
Management) and establishing the relationships
between infrastructure components
(Configuration Management). Also, with good
Release Management in place, the planning of
new services should help to avoid building in
risks.
|
The cost of Service Continuity Management must be balanced against the value of
the ICT service and the potential cost of losing it.
