What is the impact to a business should its services not be available and/or visible to customers, vendors or partners for a few hours, days, weeks or longer?  The impact is great, with the majority of companies closing within two years of an unplanned event.  Implementing a well developed and tested BC/DR Plan is critical to the continued success of the business.  Sustaining an unplanned production outage or natural disaster can expose a business to loss of revenue, resources, brand reputation and customers.  Understanding your risk is a vital first step in determining what the overall BC/DR Plan should accomplish.

Our methodology utilizes a holistic Risk Management approach working with you to understand business policy, objectives and strategy.  MasterLink's Risk Assessment process helps your business to determine technology requirements, interdependencies, process and procedures, client service level agreements and other key factors.  The main components of the Business Continuity cycle include:

Business Impact Analysis and Strategy to determine financial and operational impacts, identification of mission critical business functions and processes, identification of critical technology systems and applications, and determination of recovery requirements.  The end result of this phase identifies and documents critical elements (i.e. the Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD), Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Criteria).

Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Plan Development utilizes MasterLink consultants, project managers and engineers to assist you in the detailed and technical plan development.  Deliverables in this phase provide the following key elements of the plan:

-Initial response and notification
-Assessment and escalation
-Disaster declaration and communication plan
-Plan implementation and logistics
-Recovery, resumption and restoration

Plan Testing ensures that the continuity/recovery plan meets the defined business requirements by developing detailed test plans including definitions, testing criteria, budgets, timeframe, constraints, logistics and identification of potential risks.  This phase is often approached through multiple levels of testing depending on the organization, frequency and business requirements.

Plan Maintenance and Updates is the continuance of the DR/BC process by which we walk through and identify lessons learned, plan updates, recovery strategy modifications and other factors that work to improve the plan and testing process.

MasterLink offers Ongoing Monitoring and Support services which complement your team's core competencies and allow you to leverage our skilled engineering team and 24 x 7 manned Remote Operations Center (ROC).  MasterWatch and MasterAssist are managed services solutions which provide proactive monitoring and remote support services.  In addition, MasterLink offers end user support services and tracking as a bundled or independent offering.