Business Continuity Plan for IT Systems 

The University is heavily relying on the Central IT systems to keep and manage student, staff and alumni information. A crisis or a disaster that destroys or severely cripples the Central IT systems for a prolonged period will have great impact on the normal business operation of the University. 

Therefore a well designed Business Continuity Plan for IT Systems (BCP) must be available with the following objectives :  

• Identify the mission critical services of the University. 
• Define manual processes that can be implemented and to keep the mission critical services continued during a disaster until the technical infrastructure resumes normal. 
• Develop and test a well-structured and coherent plan which will enable the University to recover as quickly and effectively as possible  
• Establish cohesive emergency response and crisis management plan. 
• Develop a communications plan to notify teams, activate the plan, assemble personnel, assess damages, and declare a disaster. 

A Crisis Management Team (CMT) is established and chaired by the Chief Information Officer. The CMT will carry out the important tasks to examine and assess the impact of the failure on the University level, activate Business Continuity Plan(s) of relevant offices, manage the business recovery and resumption efforts, communicate with both internal and external campus constituencies and make public announcements when necessary. 

For each mission critical service, an Incident Working Team is established normally chaired by the Head of the Department who is the custodian office of the service. This team will oversee the Business Continuity Plan of the service that they are managing, recruiting members from various offices,  mobilize work force to respond to a disaster and reporting directly to the CMT.  

Up to now, the Business Continuity Plans for several mission critical services have been developed. They include :  

• University Communications for contacting students and staff 
• Students Record System for handling the important processes such as enrolment, course registration, examination arrangement, assessment and graduation. 
• Payoll System for making salary payments to staff 
• Blackboard System for e-Learning 

Details of the BCP can be found under the e-Portal which is accessible by all staff and students.  
(link: https://eportal.cityu.edu.hk/bbcswebdav/institution/APPL/BCP/index.htm)