What is meant by IT Service Continuity Management?
The term "IT Service Continuity Management" (ITSCM) refers to the process of ensuring that IT services remain available or can be restored within an acceptable timeframe in the event of a major incident or disaster. ITSCM is an essential part of Business Continuity Management and focuses on ensuring the resilience of IT infrastructure and supported services.
Typical software functions in the area of "IT Service Continuity Management":
- Risk Assessment: Identifying and analyzing risks that could threaten the availability of IT services.
- Emergency Planning: Developing and managing plans to handle IT-related disasters.
- Backup Management: Automating and monitoring data backups and recovery procedures.
- Disaster Recovery Planning: Creating recovery strategies and processes for IT systems.
- Simulation and Testing: Conducting regular tests of recovery plans to verify their effectiveness.
- Automated Recovery: Supporting the automated resumption of IT services.
- Monitoring and Reporting: Monitoring the status of critical systems and generating reports for analysis and improvement.
- Integration with Business Continuity: Linking IT plans with the overall BCM plans of an organization.
- Compliance Management: Ensuring adherence to standards and regulatory requirements.
Examples of "IT Service Continuity Management":
- Establishing a secondary data center to safeguard critical IT services during outages.
- Developing a recovery plan in case of a ransomware attack.
- Conducting test scenarios to simulate a network failure and evaluate response readiness.
- Implementing cloud backups for business-critical data and applications.
- Setting up high-availability solutions for mission-critical systems.
- Quickly resuming IT operations after a power outage through automated processes.