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Business Continuity Management: Escalation procedure (ICT).

By Johan van Soest.

Published : 2016-12-09.

Last updated : 2017-05-02.

Many ICT-departments modelled their management processes according to the ITIL (ISO 20000) standard and have a service desk/help desk process implemented that receives user incidents. In addition to the automatic Asset management process to update the CMDB , a NOC function to check the availability of the network and their attached devices is deployed. This monitoring process can automatically generate incidents (tickets) for the service desk.
As a result, user requests and various (computer) alerts (incidents) are received daily by the help desk to be serviced as fast, complete and correct as possible. Implementing the procedure below creates an additional filter to timely detect calamities.

Picture 1. Implement the Business Continuity escalation procedure in normal ITIL Servicedesk procedures. The evaluation by the service desk aims to establish if the incident is a failure or disaster/calamity. The procedure set out in picture 1 also provides for the possibility that an incident reported by, for example, Management or ERO's is directly submitted to the Business Continuity Manager for review. The ERO-employees often have good contacts with professionals in the fire and police departments, they notify them and receive information when a property can be released again for damage assessment.
The Business Continuity Manager evaluates the incident, trends and decides if the Business Continuity procedures should be activated or returns the incident to the Service desk.

Glossary

Calamity:

A calamity mostly arises from an incident of external origin that expands across multiple hardware systems, software systems or even employees. These incidents include:

Fire
Economic boycotts
Epidemics
Hacking
Floods
Sabotage
Software errors
Storm damages
Failing software updates

Of course a failure can result in a calamity. For example, a server that is running too hot for a long time and reports "overheating" as a failure can eventually result in a calamity such as a fire.

Failure:

Briefly formulated a failure is a confined problem that relates to one program or one hardware component. Solutions for failures are mostly found in redundancy and high availability systems ( HA )

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