Business Continuity Planning at GHL

Business continuity management (BCM) is a process that helps manage risks to the smooth running of an organisation or delivery of a service, ensuring continuity of critical functions in the event of a disruption, and effective recovery afterwards. Good BCM requires both incident management plans and business continuity plans. Incident management plans allow the organisation to manage the initial impact of an event, for example staff evacuation or media response. The business continuity plan allows the organisation to maintain or recover the delivery of the key products and services that the business impact assessment (BIA) identified.
 
Planning and exercising these plans minimise the impact of potential disruption. It also aids in the prompt resumption of service helping to protect market share, reputation and brand. Here at GHL, business continuity is regarded as an integral part of our normal ongoing management processes.
GHL has also become a trendsetter in the Caribbean by incorporating both business continuity and health & safety into one departmental entity. Business Continuity is, of course, much more than Health and Safety. It is the procedures, practices and protocols an organization puts into place so that it can recover and return to normal operations with the least downtime in the advent of a disaster or an extended business interruption.

Plans cannot be considered reliable until they are exercised and have proved to be workable. Exercising should involve: validating plans; rehearsing key staff; and testing systems which are relied upon to deliver resilience (e.g. uninterrupted power supply). The frequency of exercises will depend on the organisation, but should take into account the rate of change (to the organisation or risk profile), and outcomes of previous exercises (if particular weaknesses have been identified and changes made).

Each territory is expected to develop a Business Continuity Plan and review them regularly to keep them up to date. Particular attention is paid to staff changes; changes in the organisation's functions or services; changes to the organisational structure; details of suppliers or contractors; and changes in the organisation’s strategic objectives.

At GHL, we focus on three main ingredients: The Business Operations, Our Human Resources and the I.T. Operations.


The Business Operations:
What do we do in the event of a national disaster which resulted in major structural damage to our primary site? The Caribbean is vulnerable to hurricanes and there are islands that are on the earthquake belt or in proximity to volcanoes.

Where and how would we begin to restore all our operations? Which department and which functions should we recover first? To determine this, we conducted a BIA for each department of every company. This indicates the critical business functions of that unit and its level of priority.

Who determines the critical functions of a department? The manager and his/her team members are the ones familiar with the daily operations and the experts in which processes are the most important and which could be deferred. It takes many years to develop and build a reputable company. In the advent of a disaster, armed with a sound business continuity plan, it would take only several days to rebuild. Each department provides its own unique value to the group; it is important to the technical recovery process that each is restored in coordination with the core operational needs.

Human Resources:
Our human resources are our greatest asset. Unsafe practices and hazardous working conditions affecting employees result in loss of productivity. GHL has already embarked on a Health and Safety programme driven by the group’s Health and Safety policy.

Those employees responsible for implementing BCM, those responsible for acting in the event of disruption, receive extensive training. Awareness programmes are provided to those employees who have no direct responsibility but who will be impacted by the plans.


I.T. Operations:
Can any business in the Financial Services sector afford any disruption of IT services? I.T. is undeniably critical to our success, growth, competitiveness and existence. While disasters and unplanned downtime get the big headlines, planned downtime for hardware maintenance and backups is the cause of the majority of service downtime. Even slight disruptions in I.T. services can have tremendous rippling effects and result in unwanted downtime of business operations.

Business continuity has become a vital ingredient of IT strategies in a world where businesses need to operate 24 hours a day. The disruption of IT services can be fatal to a business.
At GHL the I.T. department is regularly commissioned by the BCP Department to test the recoverability and re-installation of major business applications and network services that are critical to the business operations of all the sub holdings under the GHL group.

GHL currently has its ‘hot site’ located at its Chaguanas Regional Service Centre. At this location the backup servers for all the major applications and network services are housed, data is kept updated to mirror their production counterparts at Head Office. Should a production server fail or require some maintenance, requests can be rerouted to its respective backup server at the hot site.

Companies with no business continuity planning initiatives often times fold in the aftermath of a disaster. Stakeholders and clients can be assured that GHL has positioned itself so that its brand name will continue after a crisis.