today we're going to talk about building better business continuity plans and service now's business continuity management here on the logged in is Scott Hall Scott Hall is a business continuity manager for this organization and on the admin dashboards Scott can see the status of all his be IAS and the status of all the plans those that are in a new state brand-new plans those that are currently in progress and being created those that have been submitted for approval those that are in an approved State and those that have been returned by the approver back to the contributors to add more information or detail to the plan Scott can also access the plans that he's accountable for directly by clicking on the my plans tab today we're going to go into the Salt Lake City business continuity plan which you can see is currently in an approved State on the details tab you can see that this is a plan for the Acme company and it is designed to cover the development department at the Salt Lake City location this is very common business continuity best practice to document your plans for each department at each location Allie Williams is the approver of the plan Scott Hall is the owner of the plan anyone that's listed as a contributor would have edit rights to be able to add information to the plan and that can all be locked down with access control lists as well the status of the plan is currently in an approved State you can see the date and the time that the plan was last approved you can see that this plan the cadence determines how often the plan needs to be updated and you can see the due date as well on the summary tab this gives you the opportunity to be able to document what the plan is really written for in this case the plan is for the technical development team at the Salt Lake City site it is the primary technology location for all the products that are delivered to customers so this would be a very important plan for this company the Acme corporation on the notes tab any general plan notes that need to be added can added here attachments would allow you to add things like floor plans or any attachments that would help you in your recovery efforts architectural diagrams might be another a good example comments can be added and passed back and forth between different contributors in the plan the process tab allows you to document the business processes that you're trying to protect with the plan remember the plan is the control mechanism the business impact analysis that was done for each one of these processes which culminated in a recovery time objective for each one of these is determining the inherent risk so the BIA determines the inherent risk which comes in the form of criticality and recovery time objective and then those processes are being protected by the control the control being the plan and in this case the Salt Lake City business continuity plan has been documented to protect these four different pertinent business processes and each one of those has its own specific recovery time objectives the employee tab allows you to document any employees that are on a need-to-know basis when this plan is activated these employees can also be assigned to recovery tests so they could take an active role in the smoke response and recovery efforts the location of course as I mentioned earlier very common for plans to be documented at four departments at each location in this case this is defining the location this is where you'd list any vendors this would be coming out of the company table in ServiceNow same vendor table that's utilized in vendor risk management this is where you would document any vendors that you would need to help you in your response and recovery efforts things like vendors that are providing alternate site recovery locations and AVENGERS that are providing services that you would need to leverage when you go to activate your planet adding groups to your plan and service now is actually a pretty good differentiator it allows you to utilize those teams really groups that you've established an IT service man and leverage those same groups when documenting your plant that could be things like sysadmin teams or database admin teams or facilities teams or anything that you've documented an IT service management that you utilizing for change incident and problem can be utilized and pulled in and then of course those groups can be assigned to different recovery tasks teams is essentially the same thing but this is where you're building out teams and assigning individuals to those teams within the business continuity management functionality and ServiceNow similar to groups these teams can be added or associated to recovery tasks recovery tasks this is the real core of the plan this is where you're documenting the step by step chronological things that need to happen from a response and recovery perspective each of those tasks can be worked in parallel as you can see by the parallel column there and each of those tasks can also be assigned to either groups or teams or individuals in your organization telecommunications would allow you to document any telecom equipment that you need or services that you need to have a successful recovery effort non-standard resources can be anything as simple as paper and pencil all the way to more complex type of equipment that you would need for your recovery effort recovery workstations is very common in business continuity where you're utilizing an alternate site strategy so this would be defining the standard build for your workstations so that when employees arrive at the recovery site they sit down at a workstation that has all their applications and functionality loaded lastly vital records this is where you again have the ability to document any documents that you would require and they would need to be available to you at the recovery site things like floor plans contracts that you have with specific vendors from an IT disaster recovery perspective it could be the location of backup tapes just any records that you need for success recovery and of course all this rolls back to the dashboard where I can see my planned status as what I mentioned earlier I can also see the status of all my plans and whether or not they're currently in an approved State so in closing we've covered the three benefits of business continuity planning in ServiceNow business continuity management first to minimize your risk exposure by developing good accurate plans second to optimize resources for those recovery efforts documented in the plans and number three to increase the speed of business process recovery for more information on business continuity management check out the solution page at ServiceNow com thank you and have a nice day