Business Continuity
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning are two of the most crucial areas to an organization's survival, yet most have no plan in place and many of the plans in place have not been tested and simply will not work if needed. While the terms Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are often used interchangeably, Disaster Recovery is really a subset of Business Continuity. Business Continuity includes Risk Assessment, Disaster Recovery and Business Recovery.

The objective of a Business Continuity Plan is to prepare your organization to deal with disasters of varying scope that can interrupt the course of doing business and providing your customers with products and services for extended periods of time. Through appropriate planning and contingencies, you can be positioned to protect your people, restore your processes in a timely manner and assure continued service to your customer base.

NorthStar has produced a series of practical, PC based, planning tools which will enable your organization to develop an effective Business Continuity Plan covering all your business processes and operations within a fraction of the time previously required. These are designed to help businesses of all sizes develop a Business Continuity Plan and understand how best to eliminate, reduce or compensate for the risks and vulnerabilities inherent within every business. These programs provide a comprehensive approach to planning and implementation of the plans. We test the plans to assure they accomplish the objectives and provide a series of realistic Drills (many designed to include local emergency services and utility providers) to train and reinforce the procedures with your employees.

All of our programs include Employee Training Manuals as well as Train the Trainer Manuals for your Staff. Each is designed to be easily updated and to be resident on your server. In addition, we provide a mechanism to trigger Quarterly Reviews and Annual Updates to assure that Business Continuity becomes an ongoing element in your Change Management Programs.

Several of these programs are ISO 2002 and ISO 17799 compliant.


Risk Management
NorthStar views Business Continuity from a broad perspective. This represents a holistic approach where we help you establish both a short-term plan (Disaster Recovery) as well as a longer-term plan (Business Recovery) in order to have your business operating as quickly as possible following any out-of-course events impacting your ability to operate your business.

We believe that Risk Management represents the core and foundation of any integrated disaster planning and recovery strategy and is comprised of four (4) steps:

1) Identification of Risks
2) Measurement of Levels of Risk
3) Reduction of the levels of Risk
4) Recovery Strategies (S-T and L-T)

These are then prioritized and stratified with a focus on People, Place and Processes.

Disaster Recovery
A critical part of handling any serious emergency situation is in the management of the Disaster Recovery Phase. By definition, the Disaster Recovery Phase is likely to involve, to a significant degree, external emergency services. The priority during this phase is the safety and well being of the employees and other involved persons, the minimization of the emergency itself, the removal or minimization of the threat of further injury or damage and the re-establishment of external services such as power, communications, water etc. A significant task during this phase is also the completion of Damage Assessment Forms.

In addition to the emergency services, the Disaster Recovery Phase may involve different personnel depending upon the type of emergency and a Disaster Recovery Team should be nominated according to the requirements of each specific crisis.