Force Byte
Significance of Business Continuity Plan
Police officers are experts in coming up with emergency response. For instance, our traffic teams are very experienced in making quick deployment to major traffic trunks to direct traffic manually should traffic lights fail. To make better response, we are relying more and more on IT and Communication (IC) systems in our daily work. Our radio equipment keeps us in touch with the Command Centre so that we can reach the crime scene in the shortest possible time. Our IT systems enable us to retrieve critical information on vehicles and people during patrols on the street, conduct complex intelligence analysis during crime investigation and support our day-to-day operational activities at various Formations. Can you imagine how we should respond if all these IC systems fail to work?
For critical IC-supported services, standard procedures have already been laid down, such as receiving cases from the public in the report rooms using manual Police forms in case of a computer failure due to power outage. Many of our services cannot be closed down even when our IC systems fail. Therefore, response and interim procedures are important elements of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP).
Another reason of putting in place a BCP is in the preventive measures to protect our critical IC systems against potential threats, such as power failure and hardware failure, etc. Suitable resilience, e.g. use of backup power supply and backup recovery machines, can be built in. However, we must exercise care when investing in resilience equipment to ensure cost effectiveness. It is common for one to make a spare set of keys to his apartment and leave it with his close relatives in case it is needed. However, one would seldom keep a second idle refrigerator at home just in case the working one fails because refrigerating 'service' is less critical and can be 'acquired' from neighbours. Similarly, we would not set up duplicates of all of our IC systems in another computer centre to cater for the relatively low probability of a major IC system breakdown. Therefore, we must focus on mission critical services.
What then, are mission critical services? What if over 90 per cent of our IC systems are damaged? It is rational to allocate resources with priority to those core services that are directly related to Force's mission and vision as well as services to the public, e.g. 999 services, stop and search, and voice communication, etc., whereas less priority may be given to some of the backup office-support systems.
Information Systems Wing (ISW) has established objective yardsticks to assist Formation users to classify the criticality of their IC-supported business services and ISW can plan the resilience accordingly. ISW can also help users work out appropriate response and interim procedures so that critical policing services to the public would operate with minimum interruption.
We will continue to share more ideas on BCP with you in future.
The 999 Console is one of the critical IT and Communications Systems of the
Force