ITIL - Service Continuity Management (2024)

FAQs

What is service continuity management in ITIL? ›

In ITIL 4, service continuity management is a process meant to support business continuity management (BCM). The goal of the process is to make sure services are back up and running within the agreed-upon business timelines after major service disruptions.

Business continuity focuses on keeping business operational during a disaster, while disaster recovery focuses on restoring data access and IT infrastructure after a disaster.

Examples of such events include the following: Disruptions to infrastructure such as significant equipment malfunctions and building collapse. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes.

Key Concepts. For a function to be continuous at a point, it must be defined at that point, its limit must exist at the point, and the value of the function at that point must equal the value of the limit at that point.

Although the terms 'business continuity' and 'disaster recovery' are often used interchangeably, they are two distinct – if overlapping – disciplines.

Basically, the business continuity management lifecycle has six phases to it: program management, understanding the organization, determining the BCM strategy, developing and implementing a BCM response, exercising the response, as well as maintaining, reviewing and embedding BCM in the organization's culture.

Step 1: Role planning and ownership

It's important to identify who precisely in the organisation is responsible for essential tasks and plans after a disaster event. These people need to respond quickly and initiate the BCM Plan. They may also need to be involved in the creation of the plan.

Which comes first business continuity or disaster recovery? ›

A company should have business continuity planning as the foundation of its disaster planning – therefore it needs to happen before disaster recovery planning.

Business continuity encompasses all aspects of an organization which play a role in sustaining critical processes, namely: people, premises, suppliers, technologies, and data. IT service continuity addresses the IT aspect of business continuity.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in continuity.

Service Continuity is the availability of suitable arrangements allowing alternate air navigation services (ANS) services of an agreed quality of service to be readily activated when a long-term disruption of normal service provision is anticipated.

The purpose of Service Continuity (SCON) is to establish and maintain plans to ensure continuity of services during and following any significant disruption of normal operations.

The Information Technology Service Continuity Plan is the collection of policies, standards, procedures and tools through which organisations not only improve their ability to respond when major system failures occur, but also improve their resilience to major incidents, ensuring that critical systems and services do ...