Run-Book Management

A Run-book is a collection of the procedures and operations that I.T. staff must carry out to maintain business as usual or to failover and recover systems following an unplanned outage.  It can be considered the operations manual for IT services within an organization.

The Factonomy Run-book management solution aids administrators when controlling a large number of run-books and the activities they represent.  Run-books are stored as relational data in the BCM database but can easily be output in PDF format, making it simple to print for presentation or store in physical book form if required.

Effective run-book management will ensure that operators, with prerequisite expertise, can manage and troubleshoot a system using current best practice as may be centrally updated from time-to-time.

As a part of the Factonomy BCM suite, the run-book management solution can share connections to other enterprise data sources including the mapping of processes and their owners to applications or the configuration data that can model system connections and dependencies.

The electronic and paper presentations of a run-book will include information such as dependency lists, contact details, authorization requirements and the step-by-step activities that need to be followed to complete a given task.

Run-book management is just one of the mechanisms necessary to implement best practice, increase IT personnel effectiveness and provide the tools to report on how processes are executed. By linking this process with risk assessment and business continuity planning processes, an organization can greatly strengthen resilience and provide far more robust evidence to both internal and external auditors.

Contents of a Run Book

A managed run-book will contain all of the information needed when performing day-to-day management of IT services or  responding to emergency situations impacting normal operations.

This information may include any of the following:

• Contact information - Detailed information about relevant IT staff, the building facilities staff, utility companies, vendors and crisis management team.
• Hardware components – Detailed information about hardware components.
• Software components – Detailed information about software components.
• Procedural Information - Approved and tested procedures for each operational and emergency task that may require to be performed.
• Vital Records – Access to documents, activation sequences and other controlled items that may be used during invocation.

As with all continuity planning it is necessary to access and quantify the risk associated with different types of outage and to plan resilience and recovery activities that address these.

Factonomy BCM Run-Book management will assist organizations in planning for some or all of the following types of emergencies:

• Natural disasters
• Power outages
• Server failures
• Database corruption
• Application failures
• Network failures
• Improper systems use
• Deliberate tampering