Photobox will pay £120m for Moonpig, some of which will be paid for with shares in the new company and some of which will come from bank loans and new funding from private equity investors.

Senior management from both companies will remain in the enlarged group.

Moonpig sells more than 12 million personalised greetings cards a year.

It has recently expanded its offering to include mugs, t-shirts and bottles.

“It’s great to see two high-growth, profitable and ambitious European online brands come together to leverage each other’s strengths and create a global market leader,” said Stan Laurent, who will be chief executive of the enlarged group.

Moonpig’s founder and chairman Nick Jenkins said the merger would allow it to, “take our core greeting card product to countries which would be difficult to access as a standalone business”.

Source: BBC News

Whichever camp you’re in, the bottom line is that you just can’t have an effective business continuity capability without managing your risks.

And you can’t have effective risk management without a business continuity strategy and plan.

Business continuity management and risk management are two sides of the same coin. Business continuity management is essentially a combination of risk management and contingency planning.

And risk management involves contingency planning as a key mitigation method for certain types of risk.

However you look at it, business continuity management and risk management are inextricably linked and, like love and marriage, you can’t have one without the other – at least not if you want your business continuity management and risk management to be anything like effective.

Source: IT Pro May 2009

A seven stage guide to DR planning is outlined below:
• Develop the contingency planning policy statement. A formal department or agency policy provides the authority and guidance necessary to develop an effective contingency plan.

• Conduct the business impact analysis (BIA). The BIA helps to identify and prioritize critical IT systems and components.

• Identify preventive controls. Measures taken to reduce the effects of system disruptions can increase system availability and reduce contingency life cycle costs.

• Develop recovery strategies. Thorough recovery strategies ensure that the system may be recovered quickly and effectively following a disruption.

• Develop an IT contingency plan. The contingency plan should contain detailed guidance and procedures for restoring a damaged system.

• Plan testing, training and exercises. Testing the plan identifies planning gaps, whereas training prepares recovery personnel for plan activation; both activities improve plan effectiveness and overall agency preparedness.

• Plan maintenance. The plan should be a living document that is updated regularly to remain current with system enhancements.

Source: Vangelis Solutions

Continuity planning goes well beyond the idea of simply doing a weekly full backup and storing the tape in the IT supervisor’s filing cabinet. Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is an in depth, involved process that allows a company to prepare for the unexpected.

In a nutshell, BCP involves understanding what it is you are trying to protect (inventory), how it can be affected (disaster scenarios), how likely it is to happen (risk assessment) and how to recover from it (recovery). Events such as fires, floods, acts of terrorism, equipment failure, meteorites and striking workers are all examples of disaster scenarios that may need to be addressed in your organization.

This article will show the reader how to begin the often over looked process of having a defined continuity plan in place.

Planning for the worst!

Disruption to your business can be labelled into one of six groups:

♦ Equipment failures
♦ Human error
♦ Software failures
♦ Disasters
♦ Accidents
♦ Malicious attack

How well your company reacts to these threats will determine the effectiveness of your business to withstand the threat. The goal of BCP is twofold in that it prevents services from being disrupted in the first place and provides a mechanism to restore the company to a fully functioning state as quickly as possible. The business continuity plan is the document that is drafted that helps make this possible.

But what are the steps?

Planning a BCP is a large step. That is the main reason many smaller organizations forgo one and try the age honoured reactive mode to interruptions in continuity. To put it mildly, reactive BCP is like bringing a sword to a western shootout – not very effective. For BCP to be effective it involves a number of steps.

♦ Assemble a Recovery Team.
♦ Inventory services and equipment.
♦ Determine threats to business continuity.
♦ Develop a disaster recovery plan.
♦ Develop notification procedures.
♦ Review and modify as necessary.

Source:  About Business Security

The board of directors is accountable for ensuring that the organization has developed and tested business continuity and disaster recovery plans that deal with all the likely risks that face the organization.

Vangelis Solutions is able to provide Business Continuity Planning Consultancy services. Click on and fill in the Contact Us form or call us.

When creating a DR plan for data – in this case email data – it is important to specify a Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Ideally, it would be nice to be able to recover your email data from any point in time but that is not always possible.

So you must establish which emails data are most important. All emails are not equally important. Some emails contain non-critical communications both internal and external. But other emails may communicate financial information that is not only critical to the operations of your company but also highly proprietary. Still other emails may be of a legal nature that cannot be lost and must be recovered quickly due to possible impending litigation. Any emails lost or corrupted can have a negative impact on company operations.

So the question is how often should you backup your email archives?

Are scheduled backups every hour sufficient for your company? Or are the emails that flow through your company so vital in nature that your company would suffer if restored emails are even minutes old? In this case you need constant backups.

If continuous backups are required then what backup medium will be chosen? Will it be tape or disk?

It is estimated that 40% of backups will fail. Backups rely on many infrastructure layers such as the network layer, the storage server(s) layer, the tape or disk medium being used and sometimes just plain old human interaction. All are prone to failure.

Administrators have to ensure that all applications and relevant databases have been stopped. And then the last complete backup must be located and loaded. Any incremental backups must be applied and finally the database logs must also be applied. The sum of these actions will take hours if your email archives and databases are the size that most enterprises must support.

I have seen data center recovery operations take hours and hours before end users were able to log back into the applications. So having a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) specified in your Service Level Agreement (SLA) is just as important as having your RTO defined in the first place.

Source: Mike Rede January 2009