Business Continuity Planning - Essay Example

Introduction

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is an array of plans, policies, and procedures developed to alleviate an organization's position in continuing its normal business operations upon facing adverse or disastrous conditions. The key objective of a BCP is to minimize the losses incurred due to unforeseen adverse or catastrophic circumstances. In the business continuity assessment of Google LLC, the company depicts an overall robust and reliable BCP.

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Freedom and Creativity

Under people, the company implements a policy of recruiting class-A professionals and giving them the liberty to exercise freedom and creativity. The company has a 70-20-10 culture on time allocation. Employees devote 70% of their time to the company's core business, 20% to projects associated with the company's core-business, and 10% on their own ideas competencies. Notably, the company recognizes and rewards excellent ideas formulated by its employees. New products' choice is not dedicated to Google's top management but open to every employee and is evaluated and adopted based on merit. The company's vision is freely communicated to employees who are, in turn, left to implement it in a hassle-free and conducive working environment. The company's leadership policy is anchored on empowering and facilitating workers, which has consequently led to the company's explosive growth. Google lets its employees own the problems at hand, allow them to function outside the organization's hierarchy, and have their performance assessed by someone they respect.

Scalable Products

Just like in the case of leadership, Google also scores well in processes. The company has invested in reliable and scalable products that capture a wide range of clients, including businesses, learning institutions, and government agencies. For instance, the company's robust infrastructure is engineered to support 99.978% availability with no scheduled downtimes. Unlike other industry players, the company does plan for their services to be unavailable regardless of whether there are implementing an upgrade or maintaining their systems. The company's cloud platform proffers a 99.95% service level agreement (SLA), while other services such as BigQuery and Cloud Storage offer a 99.9% service level agreement. The company implements a business continuity plan for its critical infrastructures, such as data centers and production operations. The company's BCP accounts for significant disasters, for instance, earthquakes or public health disasters, and considers a scenario whereby people and services could be unavailable for a month.

Robust Information Systems

Google has adopted one of the most robust information systems and integrated supply chain in terms of technology. For instance, to minimize interruption of their various services due to hardware failures, natural calamities, or other unforeseen occurrences, the company has invested in significantly redundant data centers infrastructure. The company's recovery time objective (RTO) target is zero or instant failover. The company's network architecture and applications are designed to offer clients maximum uptime and reliability. To withstand disruption, the company's computing platform implements robust software failovers while at the same time assuming ongoing hardware failures. All the company's systems are engineered with a redundant design, with independent subsystems not tethered to any given physical or logical services for incumbent operations.

Conclusion

From the heat map assessment, it can be concluded that Google has one of the most reliable business continuity plan supported by a distributed form of leadership, functional and reliable business processes, and robust and reliable technologies. The reliable BCP gives the company a competitive edge compared to other industry stakeholders, thus ensuring its continuity during a beyond unforeseen calamities.