Business continuity policy
Courtside Hubs CIC t/a Courtside and Premier Tennis: Business Continuity Plan
Courtside’s business continuity plan outlines the normal operation of our business, the systems, processes and services on which it depends. Possible events that could affect the ability of the business to continue to operate and their likelihood of occurrence. Continuance and restorative procedures to recover various impacted functions.
Business operations
Courtside operates effectively in a fully remote manner and although we maintain an office from which we normally run business operations and customer support services. These functions can effectively be operated from wherever our staff are located with their laptop, an internet connection and a mobile phone.
In the event that internet connectivity is unavailable from the office, staff are able to work from home or other locations such as cafés and even temporary office space. Or with a mobile data connection, anywhere. We developed a lot of experience with remote working practice during the first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
All staff use laptops and or mobile phones which they keep with them - there are no desktop computers in use in the office. These are not normally left in the office overnight. And so should not be the subject of a theft from the office or affected by some other loss of the office such as a fire.
Our office location makes flooding and storm damage an unlikely event. Fire remains a possibility however the loss of our office space due to fire would not affect the ability of the business to continue.
It may require us to re-order any product stock items stored there. In which case the procedure is:
- a stock audit of our various locations,
- prioritisation (do we need it, if so by when),
- and then ordering.
IT infrastructure and business systems
Telephone systems
We use a cloud telephone system called RingCentral to manage our phone numbers and route calls between office and mobile phones.
In the event of a system failure (hardware or connectivity) we retain the ability to redirect published phone numbers directly to individual landline or mobile phones to enable customers to continue to contact staff.
In the event of a failure of RingCentral itself we would revert to other communication methods. If the outage is likely to be protracted we may post information about it along with alternate methods on our website and or social channels.
We use the Office365 platform as our email infrastructure. It is operated and managed on behalf of Courtside by Ridgeway IT Limited. As such the resulting service level that can be expected is in line with the Service Level Agreements offered by the Office365 platform.
Email, while a non-critical means of communication, is still very important and widely used both for internal messaging and communication with customers.
Email systems are resilient and in the event of a short outage and depending on sender configuration emails will queue at the sender (usually up to 3 days) until the recipient server is available. Once the service is restored these queued emails are usually delivered.
In the worst case scenario where the Office365 platform is unavailable for an extended period of time we have the option to transfer our email service temporarily or permanently to another service provider. The approximate timeline for such a move is: at least one day for DNS propagation, and potentially one to several days for environment configuration depending on the priorities and whether the goal is to restore email function on key addresses or all addresses. Should this extreme situation arise a decision will be taken on implementation of a service move with our IT infrastructure partner.
File management
We use both Microsoft Office365’s OneDrive and Google’s GoogleDrive services to manage and share files between teams within the business and in some cases with external entities.
Staff use a file synchronisation tool which maintains a copy of these files on each company owned computer issued to staff members.
In the event of a communications failure affecting internet connectivity staff will still be able to work on files offline until connectivity is restored at which point their changes will be synchronised with the online copies.
In the event of a service outage the local offline copies of files can be used until service is restored. Using multiple file sharing services is a mitigation against one of them being out of service for any significant length of time.
Sales and booking management
Courtside’s proprietary booking management system is called “Premier Tennis Core”. It powers the websites on which customers purchase our court and coaching products. It manages the resulting bookings, customers, coaching scheduling, financial transactions, reporting, and some business management functions.
In the event that the system becomes unavailable, customers with existing court bookings who have received their access codes will still be able to get on court as the system does not need to be running for the codes to work. Customers with existing coaching bookings will still be able to attend their sessions, although coaching management will need to revert to manual processes until the system has recovered.
Possible causes of downtime include but are not limited to:
- Inadvertent regression or introduced bugs during a software deployment
- Cyber attack against the system itself or our hosting partner
- Internet connectivity failure at the data centre end
- Equipment failure at the data centre
- Other issues affecting the ability of the data centre to operate such as fire
In the event of a regression or introduced bug the software can be rolled back to the last known good configuration using the deployment system. The likely time frame from detection to resolution could be as low as a few minutes depending on the nature of the issue. The risk of this occurring is low as it is mitigated by our testing and deployment process.
Core is designed and built with consideration for resources and guidance provided by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and is run from servers which have been configured to minimise the attack surface that a cyber attack can operate against. Courtside is an unlikely target for a specifically targeted cyber attack. The likely type of attack we may be subject to is random and scripted where tools automatically look for something they can gain access to. In the event of a successful cyber attack against the system we would expect to be able to restore access within a day either through fixing the existing system, restoration of backups or re-deployment of the platform.
In the event of a data centre failure (connectivity, equipment failure, loss of building etc) which is likely to be protracted or unrecoverable where we need to migrate to a new facility. We are able to deploy a clone of the system from either a server image snapshot where possible or a fresh deployment from the code management system in conjunction with a backup of the system data. The expected recovery time is around one day to scratch build systems and allow for DNS propagation. We judge the risk of this occurring to be low.
Review and changes
This plan should be reviewed:
- At least once per year.
- If there is a change to any of the named staff members such as a role change or they are no longer employed by Courtside or its subsidiaries
- If there is a change to any of the named service providers or the service that they are providing
- If there is a significant change to Courtside’s business operations that invalidates this plan either whole or in part
Approval
Approved by Mr J Hunter, Managing Director.